A resurgent lib dems, is the last thing the Tories need to hear, that could spell big trouble for them if it continues
Let's put "resurgence" in context for a second.
The LibDems are polling 13% right now, maybe 14% in a poll or two.
That's well up on where they were in 2015 (7.9%) and 2017 (7.4%), but is only a couple of percent above 2019 (11.6%).
Let's assume that they continue to improve and get to 15-16% at the General Election, which is a not inconceivable scenario. Fuck it. Let's go with 16%.
Let's also assume that the Conservatives drop 10% on their 2019 vote share.
The LDs will win a bunch of seats: they'll capture Wimbledon, Cheltenham, Winchester, and at least half a dozen more seats.
But getting beyond about 25 seats (a more than doubling from 2019) is tough.
I don’t disagree with your conclusions, but have you properly factored in tactical voting against Tory incumbents, i.e, borrowed votes from Labour?
If there's a repeat of GROT* from 1997, then that could have a very major impact on results.
It'd be interesting to run a simulation where 50% of the third placed party (if LD or Lab) went for the challenger with the best chance of beating the Conservatives. If they have dropped to 35% in the polls *and* there's widespread tactical voting then it could be a bloodbath for them, and the LDs could see a repeat of the 1997 election when they saw their vote share drop, and their seats double.
That said... the move to new boundaries confuses things, and makes tactical voting harder.
* GROT: Get Rid of Them
I reckon this is overplayed. There aren't many seats where the main challenger isn't obvious. 1997 was on new boundaries, too.
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
I can still remember, as a child, hearing the adults ask each other: “Do you have a telephone?”
Meaning: do you have a telephone connection
The smartphone is surely the most important invention of the last 50 years
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
Average real wages in the UK will still be lower in 2026 than they were in 2008, analysis released by the Office Budget Responsibility (OBR) projects.
In the round people are obviously better off today than they were in 1972, but that's a pretty bloody low bar to be setting. And might one venture to suggest that an economic settlement in which the rich keep getting richer whilst Joe Average is basically left to rot until God alone knows when is somewhat sub-optimal?
What is a 'better' bar to be setting then? How much better off should people be?
Say we have one outlier; for example a person with three trillion pounds in wealth. Does that matter if a) (s)he has no real power over us, and b) we are all better off?
Why does the rich getting richer matter if the living standards of the rest of us increase?
And my *impression* is that social mobility is increasing, not decreasing. If you have talent, and the will, you can be successful. Much more so than in my dad's day.
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
I can still remember, as a child, hearing the adults ask each other: “Do you have a telephone?”
Meaning: do you have a telephone connection
The smartphone is surely the most important invention of the last 50 years
I became a teenager in 1986, the same year I started at a private school (so they were not too poor). My parents told me not to spend too long on the phone due to the cost, and because they might get an incoming call.
The world is the same as it was then, but also very different.
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
Average real wages in the UK will still be lower in 2026 than they were in 2008, analysis released by the Office Budget Responsibility (OBR) projects.
In the round people are obviously better off today than they were in 1972, but that's a pretty bloody low bar to be setting. And might one venture to suggest that an economic settlement in which the rich keep getting richer whilst Joe Average is basically left to rot until God alone knows when is somewhat sub-optimal?
It is worth noting that real wage growth has been pretty appalling in pretty much every major developed economy (except Australia and Canada) since 2008. This isn't just a British thing.
Quite so. It is true across the West
And why? Because there has been a global “levelling up”. Especially in Asia. Hundreds of millions of people who were VERY poor in 2008 are now middle class. This is something to be celebrated not lamented. So, OK, everyone in NATO is treading water economically. But a billion people now have fridges, cars, good healthcare, when before they were in dire poverty
This same process, globalisation (allied with technology), also means that someone on a 2008 wage can afford a whole lot more in 2022. Instant communication with the entire planet, for a start. A brilliant computer in every hand
That’s what I’ve been told is happening by my source inside Starmer’s camp.
Well, I'm not sure what "your source" knows or thinks but there will be no overt pact, deal, arrangement or understanding between Labour and the LDs. Labour will fight every seat (bar the Speaker) while the LDs will fight every seat bar any which they have by-passed in favour of the Greens.
As to the amounts of activity by each party in any particular seat, that's not for me to say.
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
I can still remember, as a child, hearing the adults ask each other: “Do you have a telephone?”
Meaning: do you have a telephone connection
The smartphone is surely the most important invention of the last 50 years
I became a teenager in 1986, the same year I started at a private school (so they were not too poor). My parents told me not to spend too long on the phone due to the cost, and because they might get an incoming call.
The world is the same as it was then, but also very different.
As a homesick teenage student at UCL in the 1980s, living in Halls of Residence, I can remember the queue to use one of the three pay phones in the Halls. Everyone jangling their change impatiently, then you got 5 minutes talking to your Mum or whatever. Telephonically no different from the experience of soldiers ringing home in WW2, or journalists waiting to call HQ in movies set in the 1930s
All is changed, changed utterly. An unspoken revolution
A resurgent lib dems, is the last thing the Tories need to hear, that could spell big trouble for them if it continues
Let's put "resurgence" in context for a second.
The LibDems are polling 13% right now, maybe 14% in a poll or two.
That's well up on where they were in 2015 (7.9%) and 2017 (7.4%), but is only a couple of percent above 2019 (11.6%).
Let's assume that they continue to improve and get to 15-16% at the General Election, which is a not inconceivable scenario. Fuck it. Let's go with 16%.
Let's also assume that the Conservatives drop 10% on their 2019 vote share.
The LDs will win a bunch of seats: they'll capture Wimbledon, Cheltenham, Winchester, and at least half a dozen more seats.
But getting beyond about 25 seats (a more than doubling from 2019) is tough.
I don’t disagree with your conclusions, but have you properly factored in tactical voting against Tory incumbents, i.e, borrowed votes from Labour?
If there's a repeat of GROT* from 1997, then that could have a very major impact on results.
It'd be interesting to run a simulation where 50% of the third placed party (if LD or Lab) went for the challenger with the best chance of beating the Conservatives. If they have dropped to 35% in the polls *and* there's widespread tactical voting then it could be a bloodbath for them, and the LDs could see a repeat of the 1997 election when they saw their vote share drop, and their seats double.
That said... the move to new boundaries confuses things, and makes tactical voting harder.
* GROT: Get Rid of Them
Don't forget that in 1997 the Lib Dems polled only 16.8% for 46 seats. The Lib Dem seat tally tracks the Conservative vote share inversely much more strongly than the Lib Dem vote share, against which seat changes are nearly random.
That's a fair point. In the last four General Elections, the LibDem vote and seat counts have only moved in the same direction once - 2015.
Not the case at GE2019. Overall votes UP nearly 4% overall seats DOWN 1
Best was GE1997 when the LD vote share dropped 1.6% but their seat haul went up from 20 to 46.
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
Average real wages in the UK will still be lower in 2026 than they were in 2008, analysis released by the Office Budget Responsibility (OBR) projects.
In the round people are obviously better off today than they were in 1972, but that's a pretty bloody low bar to be setting. And might one venture to suggest that an economic settlement in which the rich keep getting richer whilst Joe Average is basically left to rot until God alone knows when is somewhat sub-optimal?
It is worth noting that real wage growth has been pretty appalling in pretty much every major developed economy (except Australia and Canada) since 2008. This isn't just a British thing.
Quite so. It is true across the West
And why? Because there has been a global “levelling up”. Especially in Asia. Hundreds of millions of people who were VERY poor in 2008 are now middle class. This is something to be celebrated not lamented. So, OK, everyone in NATO is treading water economically. But a billion people now have fridges, cars, good healthcare, when before they were in dire poverty
This same process, globalisation (allied with technology), also means that someone on a 2008 wage can afford a whole lot more in 2022. Instant communication with the entire planet, for a start. A brilliant computer in every hand
Guess what, we are living in the best World there’s even been.
His recent book, Rationality goes into much more depth about the media scaremongering causes of our thinking the opposite is the case. Many Amercians still think that more people die in plane crashes in the US (somewhere in the three figures per year, depending on how you measure it), than in car crashes (somewhere around 40,000 per year), because car crashes don’t make the news.
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
I can still remember, as a child, hearing the adults ask each other: “Do you have a telephone?”
Meaning: do you have a telephone connection
The smartphone is surely the most important invention of the last 50 years
Smartphones have changed the way we meet when going out. Instead of making detailed arrangements to rendezvous outside the cinema at 7pm, it is now get within a mile or so, and half an hour or so, then phone to check where everyone is. But does a phone do anything that was not already done by separate technologies? We had music and telly and books and phones and cameras and so on already, and the smartphone just consolidates them.
For a single invention, what about MRI machines that have revolutionised medical diagnosis and also psychology/neuroscience in the shape of functional MRI (seeing where in the brain lights up when someone plays the violin and so on)? Invented in the mid-70s so qualifies (in America and Nottingham!)
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
Average real wages in the UK will still be lower in 2026 than they were in 2008, analysis released by the Office Budget Responsibility (OBR) projects.
In the round people are obviously better off today than they were in 1972, but that's a pretty bloody low bar to be setting. And might one venture to suggest that an economic settlement in which the rich keep getting richer whilst Joe Average is basically left to rot until God alone knows when is somewhat sub-optimal?
It is worth noting that real wage growth has been pretty appalling in pretty much every major developed economy (except Australia and Canada) since 2008. This isn't just a British thing.
Quite so. It is true across the West
And why? Because there has been a global “levelling up”. Especially in Asia. Hundreds of millions of people who were VERY poor in 2008 are now middle class. This is something to be celebrated not lamented. So, OK, everyone in NATO is treading water economically. But a billion people now have fridges, cars, good healthcare, when before they were in dire poverty
This same process, globalisation (allied with technology), also means that someone on a 2008 wage can afford a whole lot more in 2022. Instant communication with the entire planet, for a start. A brilliant computer in every hand
IMV it also makes war less likely, as a whole, for several reasons. People are *generally* having fewer children, therefore less cannon fodder (witness Russia). The cannon fodder can 'see' the wider world much more easily. And increasing numbers have too much to lose to want a big war. If you have a washing machine, what do you gain from going to Ukraine to loot one? And if there is a war, *your* washing machine might end up getting looted. And you want more pay to be in the military.
There are ways for a regime to get around this (witness Russia), but I think those ways are going to get increasingly hard to maintain.
I'm not proclaiming 'the end of war'; far from it. It's just that war is becoming harder for leaderships to 'sell' to their people.
A resurgent lib dems, is the last thing the Tories need to hear, that could spell big trouble for them if it continues
Let's put "resurgence" in context for a second.
The LibDems are polling 13% right now, maybe 14% in a poll or two.
That's well up on where they were in 2015 (7.9%) and 2017 (7.4%), but is only a couple of percent above 2019 (11.6%).
Let's assume that they continue to improve and get to 15-16% at the General Election, which is a not inconceivable scenario. Fuck it. Let's go with 16%.
Let's also assume that the Conservatives drop 10% on their 2019 vote share.
The LDs will win a bunch of seats: they'll capture Wimbledon, Cheltenham, Winchester, and at least half a dozen more seats.
But getting beyond about 25 seats (a more than doubling from 2019) is tough.
And assume they lose two in Cumbria and the far north of Scotland, plus all the by-elections.
As a homesick teenage student at UCL in the 1980s, living in Halls of Residence, I can remember the queue to use one of the three pay phones in the Halls. Everyone jangling their change impatiently, then you got 5 minutes talking to your Mum or whatever. Telephonically no different from the experience of soldiers ringing home in WW2, or journalists waiting to call HQ in movies set in the 1930s
All is changed, changed utterly. An unspoken revolution
When Mrs Stodge came over from New Zealand in 1991, her only communications with her parents in NZ were either letter or a weekly phone call which cost an arm and a leg.
Now, thanks to the much-derided Facetime or Teams, she can talk to her mother free for as long as she likes and it is as though they are in the same room.
As you rightly say, remarkable progress in 30 years - begs the question what the next 30 years might offer.
A resurgent lib dems, is the last thing the Tories need to hear, that could spell big trouble for them if it continues
Let's put "resurgence" in context for a second.
The LibDems are polling 13% right now, maybe 14% in a poll or two.
That's well up on where they were in 2015 (7.9%) and 2017 (7.4%), but is only a couple of percent above 2019 (11.6%).
Let's assume that they continue to improve and get to 15-16% at the General Election, which is a not inconceivable scenario. Fuck it. Let's go with 16%.
Let's also assume that the Conservatives drop 10% on their 2019 vote share.
The LDs will win a bunch of seats: they'll capture Wimbledon, Cheltenham, Winchester, and at least half a dozen more seats.
But getting beyond about 25 seats (a more than doubling from 2019) is tough.
I don’t disagree with your conclusions, but have you properly factored in tactical voting against Tory incumbents, i.e, borrowed votes from Labour?
If there's a repeat of GROT* from 1997, then that could have a very major impact on results.
It'd be interesting to run a simulation where 50% of the third placed party (if LD or Lab) went for the challenger with the best chance of beating the Conservatives. If they have dropped to 35% in the polls *and* there's widespread tactical voting then it could be a bloodbath for them, and the LDs could see a repeat of the 1997 election when they saw their vote share drop, and their seats double.
That said... the move to new boundaries confuses things, and makes tactical voting harder.
* GROT: Get Rid of Them
Probably not by much. Broadly speaking, in rural areas (except in North Wales and the very far North of England,) you vote Lib Dem to get rid of the Tories. Everywhere else you vote Labour. I know that's a crude generalisation and there are bound to be exceptions, but plenty of voters will not find this difficult to work out.
Or in very wealthy and affluent suburbs and towns where the LDs are also usually the main challengers to the Tories eg Esher and Walton, Richmond Park, Twickenham, Wimbledon, Oxford West and Abingdon and Winchester and St Albans
Also true.
A lot of Conservative seats are potentially vulnerable to the LDs in the event of large scale tactical voting, although at a guess I'd say that the best predictors ought to be a combination of three partially overlapping measures: average wealth (measured by incomes and/or property prices,) average age, and the vote shares from the EU referendum. Richer, younger and more pro-EU = better territory for the Lib Dems.
That's why, regardless of what happens in the by-election in Devon, you'd think they would have the most joy at a General Election in West London, the Western Home Counties, out along the M4 corridor, and around Cambridge. Only an electoral cataclysm for the Tories is likely to see their grip greatly loosened in East Anglia, the West Country and much of the Midlands.
If, as seems at least a distinct possibility, the Conservatives do end up in opposition after the next election, then this will also entail a shift in the centre of gravity of the party out of the South-East and further into the provinces. It's quite feasible to imagine the count of Conservative MPs left in London being reduced to single figures.
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
I can still remember, as a child, hearing the adults ask each other: “Do you have a telephone?”
Meaning: do you have a telephone connection
The smartphone is surely the most important invention of the last 50 years
Smartphones have changed the way we meet when going out. Instead of making detailed arrangements to rendezvous outside the cinema at 7pm, it is now get within a mile or so, and half an hour or so, then phone to check where everyone is. But does a phone do anything that was not already done by separate technologies? We had music and telly and books and phones and cameras and so on already, and the smartphone just consolidates them.
For a single invention, what about MRI machines that have revolutionised medical diagnosis and also psychology/neuroscience in the shape of functional MRI (seeing where in the brain lights up when people do play the violin and so on)? Invented in the mid-70s so qualifies (in America and Nottingham!)
GPS.
GPS has revolutionised the world in so many ways, and there was no alternative (well, there was LORAN / LORAN-C...). GPS's benefits are not just about pootling around in your car.
The open nature of GPS is worth tens of billions to the world each year. God bless the US military!
The LibDems are polling 13% right now, maybe 14% in a poll or two.
That's well up on where they were in 2015 (7.9%) and 2017 (7.4%), but is only a couple of percent above 2019 (11.6%).
Let's assume that they continue to improve and get to 15-16% at the General Election, which is a not inconceivable scenario. Fuck it. Let's go with 16%.
Let's also assume that the Conservatives drop 10% on their 2019 vote share.
The LDs will win a bunch of seats: they'll capture Wimbledon, Cheltenham, Winchester, and at least half a dozen more seats.
But getting beyond about 25 seats (a more than doubling from 2019) is tough.
And assume they lose two in Cumbria and the far north of Scotland, plus all the by-elections.
What about 16% and the Conservatives down to 30% with the LD vote particularly well distributed across the south? Woking, Guildford, South West Surrey? I could easily see 25 gains in a Conservative collapse.
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
I can still remember, as a child, hearing the adults ask each other: “Do you have a telephone?”
Meaning: do you have a telephone connection
The smartphone is surely the most important invention of the last 50 years
I became a teenager in 1986, the same year I started at a private school (so they were not too poor). My parents told me not to spend too long on the phone due to the cost, and because they might get an incoming call.
The world is the same as it was then, but also very different.
As a homesick teenage student at UCL in the 1980s, living in Halls of Residence, I can remember the queue to use one of the three pay phones in the Halls. Everyone jangling their change impatiently, then you got 5 minutes talking to your Mum or whatever. Telephonically no different from the experience of soldiers ringing home in WW2, or journalists waiting to call HQ in movies set in the 1930s
All is changed, changed utterly. An unspoken revolution
When I walked the Pennine Way in 1999, I carried a mobile phone. I also carried some phone cards for use in phone boxes. I don't know when they died out, but I have probably not seen one for well over 20 years.
My great-grandad was born in the 1870s and died in the 1960s. Think of the way the world changed for him: radio, TV, planes, cars, space travel, nuclear power, nuclear weapons, common travel, common international travel, etc, etc.
The rate of compressed change must have been staggering. But people coped.
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
I really do hope that SKS and labour decide that now is the time to introduce a wealth tax. Ideally they will also bin council tax at the same time but something does need to be done.
It should certainly implement a shift away from taxation of earned incomes and toward the taxation of assets. Higher taxes on capital gains (including on the sale of primary residences,) sumptuary taxation of second homes and a large expansion in the levying of death duties are also desirable.
Just to throw an extra idea out there, I would crack down on companies that pay out fat dividends to shareholders whilst imposing real terms pay cuts on their employees. Wage settlements below the rate of inflation should mean no goodies for the owners.
Anyone who goes near a tax on the sale of private property will not see power
The other problem of attacking shares and dividends is they make up most peoples pension portfolio which 8f attacked will be equally unpopular
There is a reason this has not been touched before though a moderation in IHT allowances and a wealth tax time has come
Sadly you're probably right about capital gains on the sales of primary residences, but the thorough soaking of second home owners should be doable. People who own holiday homes are simply taking primary residences away from other people and, through the constriction of supply, making their contribution to the stoking of runaway house price inflation, which is the great evil that bedevils our economy. Why bother to invest in anything other than piles of fundamentally unproductive bricks when they represent a huge guaranteed return for zero risk?
Most people will benefit more from having their wages boosted than they will from having their pension pots boosted. If their wages are shite then they can't afford luxuries like pension contributions to begin with. And there seems nothing illogical in the basic concept that a private enterprise that is genuinely too skint to properly compensate its staff must also, by extension, be too skint to offer returns to its investors. Businesses that inflict poverty pay whilst distributing fat dividends are bleeding their employees white so that the owners can get richer
IHT is constructed so it's possible, under certain circumstances, to transmit a fortune of a million pounds without paying a penny. We don't need a minor correction of the allowances, we need a complete overhaul. If the bulk of estates (save where everything was being left to a surviving spouse) were subject to at least some level of IHT, then the Treasury could raise a fortune.
Holiday homes are being addressed in Wales and I believe Gove said something about England
Pension schemes grow over a long period of investment in dividends, no matter whether they are contributory or not and suggesting you have higher wages rather than accruing a pension could be the worst decision you ever make
I am not at all certain IHT on all estates would be a vote winner as you would have fierce objections from across the country, but 1 million tax free is far too high
In some Tory seats in parts of the Home Counties eg Beaconsfield, Esher and Walton vulnerable to the LDs as well as much of central London vulnerable to Labour £1 million is the average property price now.
Even in the South East overall the average property price is over £400k ie above the previous IHT threshold
Raab hasn't a hope now in E&W now that he's irrevocably hitched his already tarnished star to Johnson. And he will likely take all the poor bloody infantry (Borough and County Councillors) down with him.
Good to see at least some fishermen admitting they were duped by Vote Leave and the pathological liar Johnson . ITV News bluntly telling everyone just how much damage has been caused .
I doubt we’d see a similar item on the BBC News with the vindictive Dorries waiting to cause more damage to the organization.
The LibDems are polling 13% right now, maybe 14% in a poll or two.
That's well up on where they were in 2015 (7.9%) and 2017 (7.4%), but is only a couple of percent above 2019 (11.6%).
Let's assume that they continue to improve and get to 15-16% at the General Election, which is a not inconceivable scenario. Fuck it. Let's go with 16%.
Let's also assume that the Conservatives drop 10% on their 2019 vote share.
The LDs will win a bunch of seats: they'll capture Wimbledon, Cheltenham, Winchester, and at least half a dozen more seats.
But getting beyond about 25 seats (a more than doubling from 2019) is tough.
And assume they lose two in Cumbria and the far north of Scotland, plus all the by-elections.
What about 16% and the Conservatives down to 30% with the LD vote particularly well distributed across the south? Woking, Guildford, South West Surrey? I could easily see 25 gains in a Conservative collapse.
Upon reflection, I went too far in totally excluding Chesham and Amersham, and the new seat in Cumbria. I see a small number of potential gains in London, a few more in Surrey, a few more around the Home Counties, and one or two in rich towns elsewhere. Inevitably there will be some near-misses. (And all this is contingent on polling somewhere around 15% versus low-30s Tories.)
A resurgent lib dems, is the last thing the Tories need to hear, that could spell big trouble for them if it continues
Let's put "resurgence" in context for a second.
The LibDems are polling 13% right now, maybe 14% in a poll or two.
That's well up on where they were in 2015 (7.9%) and 2017 (7.4%), but is only a couple of percent above 2019 (11.6%).
Let's assume that they continue to improve and get to 15-16% at the General Election, which is a not inconceivable scenario. Fuck it. Let's go with 16%.
Let's also assume that the Conservatives drop 10% on their 2019 vote share.
The LDs will win a bunch of seats: they'll capture Wimbledon, Cheltenham, Winchester, and at least half a dozen more seats.
But getting beyond about 25 seats (a more than doubling from 2019) is tough.
And assume they lose two in Cumbria and the far north of Scotland, plus all the by-elections.
Two in Cumbria? They only have Westmoreland & Lonsdale, don't they? And if the LDs are up 4 points, and the Tories down 10 (all far from certain), then I'd expect Farron to hang on.
The successor seat in the North of Scotland is definitely a goner, mind.
As a homesick teenage student at UCL in the 1980s, living in Halls of Residence, I can remember the queue to use one of the three pay phones in the Halls. Everyone jangling their change impatiently, then you got 5 minutes talking to your Mum or whatever. Telephonically no different from the experience of soldiers ringing home in WW2, or journalists waiting to call HQ in movies set in the 1930s
All is changed, changed utterly. An unspoken revolution
When Mrs Stodge came over from New Zealand in 1991, her only communications with her parents in NZ were either letter or a weekly phone call which cost an arm and a leg.
Now, thanks to the much-derided Facetime or Teams, she can talk to her mother free for as long as she likes and it is as though they are in the same room.
As you rightly say, remarkable progress in 30 years - begs the question what the next 30 years might offer.
My sister in the early 80s in NZ - communication by mailed cassette-recordings.
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
Average real wages in the UK will still be lower in 2026 than they were in 2008, analysis released by the Office Budget Responsibility (OBR) projects.
In the round people are obviously better off today than they were in 1972, but that's a pretty bloody low bar to be setting. And might one venture to suggest that an economic settlement in which the rich keep getting richer whilst Joe Average is basically left to rot until God alone knows when is somewhat sub-optimal?
What is a 'better' bar to be setting then? How much better off should people be?
Say we have one outlier; for example a person with three trillion pounds in wealth. Does that matter if a) (s)he has no real power over us, and b) we are all better off?
Why does the rich getting richer matter if the living standards of the rest of us increase?
And my *impression* is that social mobility is increasing, not decreasing. If you have talent, and the will, you can be successful. Much more so than in my dad's day.
The system does not work for most people if their incomes are stagnating for decades on end whilst the wealthy continue to get better off. What this implies is that the cake is still getting bigger but the privileged minority are getting a larger portion of it with every passing year. If that continues for long enough then we'll eventually end up back with a new iteration of the pre-modern economy, in which a small number of nobility and gentry basically receive money for nothing and everybody else is a peasant.
The living standards of the rest of us aren't increasing - the very poor have been getting poorer for many years, and now the process of immiseration is accelerating further up the income scale - and that's why the rich getting richer matters. If the economy is structured to funnel wealth continually upwards, then most of us simply end up spending our lives being shat upon.
A resurgent lib dems, is the last thing the Tories need to hear, that could spell big trouble for them if it continues
Let's put "resurgence" in context for a second.
The LibDems are polling 13% right now, maybe 14% in a poll or two.
That's well up on where they were in 2015 (7.9%) and 2017 (7.4%), but is only a couple of percent above 2019 (11.6%).
Let's assume that they continue to improve and get to 15-16% at the General Election, which is a not inconceivable scenario. Fuck it. Let's go with 16%.
Let's also assume that the Conservatives drop 10% on their 2019 vote share.
The LDs will win a bunch of seats: they'll capture Wimbledon, Cheltenham, Winchester, and at least half a dozen more seats.
But getting beyond about 25 seats (a more than doubling from 2019) is tough.
And assume they lose two in Cumbria and the far north of Scotland, plus all the by-elections.
Two in Cumbria? They only have Westmoreland & Lonsdale, don't they? And if the LDs are up 4 points, and the Tories down 10 (all far from certain), then I'd expect Farron to hang on.
The successor seat in the North of Scotland is definitely a goner, mind.
I meant one in each of those two regions; but in retrospect, yes, I went too far to count Westmorland as a goner even after a redistricting.
As a homesick teenage student at UCL in the 1980s, living in Halls of Residence, I can remember the queue to use one of the three pay phones in the Halls. Everyone jangling their change impatiently, then you got 5 minutes talking to your Mum or whatever. Telephonically no different from the experience of soldiers ringing home in WW2, or journalists waiting to call HQ in movies set in the 1930s
All is changed, changed utterly. An unspoken revolution
When Mrs Stodge came over from New Zealand in 1991, her only communications with her parents in NZ were either letter or a weekly phone call which cost an arm and a leg.
Now, thanks to the much-derided Facetime or Teams, she can talk to her mother free for as long as she likes and it is as though they are in the same room.
As you rightly say, remarkable progress in 30 years - begs the question what the next 30 years might offer.
My sister in the early 80s in NZ - communication by mailed cassette-recordings.
I remember the very expensive calls, and also the half second delay.
The world is changing irrevocably before our eyes, yet few care to admit it.
I remember how much of a huge executive status symbol a "carphone" was. Associated with the trading, business and cityboy elite, in a way which now seems comical.
I remember how much of a huge executive status symbol a "carphone" was. Associated with the trading, business and cityboy elite, in a way which now seems comical.
I remember how much of a huge executive status symbol a "carphone" was. Associated with the trading, business and cityboy elite, in a way which now seems comical.
When I worked in the City we had an early "portable" phone that came in its own canvas bag to hold its heavy battery. We couriered it round to an unwell colleague's rented flat so he could phone the office from his sickbed.
Does anyone still think Boris will increase his majority at the next election?
He will not be fighting it
You say this with such confidence, even though you said Johnson would lose the VONC too
I am with the 148 and will do everything to see Boris out of office and support the aims of the 148 100%.
I have e mailed my mp who voted for Boris accordingly and affirmed my support for Penny Mordaunt
The longer the polls are bad the less likely he is to survive, and do not underestimate the conservative party's desire for power and reinvention
They never got rid of Major
I would just say that if Boris leads into GE24 he will have had to have a remarkable recovery in popularity otherwise the 148 will see him gone on good time
Cut VAT on fuel to 0%, cut fuel duty for a year. Labour should back it.
Doesn't really fit with the zero carbon agenda though. There is a significant interest which is quite pleased with high fuel prices because it pushes people away from the internal combustion engine. Not saying I back this approach (though I have some nuanced sympathy for it) - but it doesn't fit in with Labour's general approach to transport and the environment.
Yes. I've definitely been driving less since the fuel prices rose. Biking more and catching the bus in marginal situations rather than jumping in the car. Enjoying it. Cars are more hassle than they are worth round here much of the time, trying to park etc. Just force of habit pushes me into it normally.
That can't be true. I've been assured that demand for fuel is price inelastic.
UK productivity stagnation has been worse than peers.
And the currency / investment / trade picture has been uniquely shite over the past few years. As are current growth and inflation forecasts.
Saying otherwise gives false succour to Tory apologists, and/or declinists.
Margaret Thatcher is spinning in her grave.
Is she? Surely Mrs Thatcher started this notion, adopted by New Labour, that Britain should close its industries and rely on the service sector instead.
And Mrs T would be delighted that Boris just today has effectively relaunched right-to-buy (well, sort of).
CH 4 News pointing out that Liz Truss encouraged British citizens to go and fight there. What a foolish thing for a Foreign Secretary to do. Jenrick seems to be rowing back but they have footage of her saying it. These incompetents cant do anything right.
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
I can still remember, as a child, hearing the adults ask each other: “Do you have a telephone?”
Meaning: do you have a telephone connection
The smartphone is surely the most important invention of the last 50 years
I became a teenager in 1986, the same year I started at a private school (so they were not too poor). My parents told me not to spend too long on the phone due to the cost, and because they might get an incoming call.
The world is the same as it was then, but also very different.
As a homesick teenage student at UCL in the 1980s, living in Halls of Residence, I can remember the queue to use one of the three pay phones in the Halls. Everyone jangling their change impatiently, then you got 5 minutes talking to your Mum or whatever. Telephonically no different from the experience of soldiers ringing home in WW2, or journalists waiting to call HQ in movies set in the 1930s
All is changed, changed utterly. An unspoken revolution
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
Average real wages in the UK will still be lower in 2026 than they were in 2008, analysis released by the Office Budget Responsibility (OBR) projects.
In the round people are obviously better off today than they were in 1972, but that's a pretty bloody low bar to be setting. And might one venture to suggest that an economic settlement in which the rich keep getting richer whilst Joe Average is basically left to rot until God alone knows when is somewhat sub-optimal?
What is a 'better' bar to be setting then? How much better off should people be?
Say we have one outlier; for example a person with three trillion pounds in wealth. Does that matter if a) (s)he has no real power over us, and b) we are all better off?
Why does the rich getting richer matter if the living standards of the rest of us increase?
And my *impression* is that social mobility is increasing, not decreasing. If you have talent, and the will, you can be successful. Much more so than in my dad's day.
The system does not work for most people if their incomes are stagnating for decades on end whilst the wealthy continue to get better off. What this implies is that the cake is still getting bigger but the privileged minority are getting a larger portion of it with every passing year. If that continues for long enough then we'll eventually end up back with a new iteration of the pre-modern economy, in which a small number of nobility and gentry basically receive money for nothing and everybody else is a peasant.
The living standards of the rest of us aren't increasing - the very poor have been getting poorer for many years, and now the process of immiseration is accelerating further up the income scale - and that's why the rich getting richer matters. If the economy is structured to funnel wealth continually upwards, then most of us simply end up spending our lives being shat upon.
The “wealthy” are 20-30% down this year, as most of their wealth is tied up in the stock markets.
Now, someone who was worth $300m and is now worth $200m, isn’t going to be struggling to pay their cleaner, but the downturn does affect business at a macro level.
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
Average real wages in the UK will still be lower in 2026 than they were in 2008, analysis released by the Office Budget Responsibility (OBR) projects.
In the round people are obviously better off today than they were in 1972, but that's a pretty bloody low bar to be setting. And might one venture to suggest that an economic settlement in which the rich keep getting richer whilst Joe Average is basically left to rot until God alone knows when is somewhat sub-optimal?
What is a 'better' bar to be setting then? How much better off should people be?
Say we have one outlier; for example a person with three trillion pounds in wealth. Does that matter if a) (s)he has no real power over us, and b) we are all better off?
Why does the rich getting richer matter if the living standards of the rest of us increase?
And my *impression* is that social mobility is increasing, not decreasing. If you have talent, and the will, you can be successful. Much more so than in my dad's day.
The system does not work for most people if their incomes are stagnating for decades on end whilst the wealthy continue to get better off. What this implies is that the cake is still getting bigger but the privileged minority are getting a larger portion of it with every passing year. If that continues for long enough then we'll eventually end up back with a new iteration of the pre-modern economy, in which a small number of nobility and gentry basically receive money for nothing and everybody else is a peasant.
The living standards of the rest of us aren't increasing - the very poor have been getting poorer for many years, and now the process of immiseration is accelerating further up the income scale - and that's why the rich getting richer matters. If the economy is structured to funnel wealth continually upwards, then most of us simply end up spending our lives being shat upon.
read this thread, and tell me with all seriousness that life for the bottom 25% is 'worse' than it was 50 years ago. And that social mobility is worse.
Because they're better, not worse.
This doesn't mean we cannot improve things. It's just that 'poverty' might mean a very different thing to what it did back then.
CH 4 News pointing out that Liz Truss encouraged British citizens to go and fight there. What a foolish thing for a Foreign Secretary to do. Jenrick seems to be rowing back but they have footage of her saying it. These incompetents cant do anything right.
It's irresponsible of them to try to make something of that. The people who were put on 'trial' by the DNR had been long-term Ukrainian residents with dual citizenship.
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
Average real wages in the UK will still be lower in 2026 than they were in 2008, analysis released by the Office Budget Responsibility (OBR) projects.
In the round people are obviously better off today than they were in 1972, but that's a pretty bloody low bar to be setting. And might one venture to suggest that an economic settlement in which the rich keep getting richer whilst Joe Average is basically left to rot until God alone knows when is somewhat sub-optimal?
What is a 'better' bar to be setting then? How much better off should people be?
Say we have one outlier; for example a person with three trillion pounds in wealth. Does that matter if a) (s)he has no real power over us, and b) we are all better off?
Why does the rich getting richer matter if the living standards of the rest of us increase?
And my *impression* is that social mobility is increasing, not decreasing. If you have talent, and the will, you can be successful. Much more so than in my dad's day.
The system does not work for most people if their incomes are stagnating for decades on end whilst the wealthy continue to get better off. What this implies is that the cake is still getting bigger but the privileged minority are getting a larger portion of it with every passing year. If that continues for long enough then we'll eventually end up back with a new iteration of the pre-modern economy, in which a small number of nobility and gentry basically receive money for nothing and everybody else is a peasant.
The living standards of the rest of us aren't increasing - the very poor have been getting poorer for many years, and now the process of immiseration is accelerating further up the income scale - and that's why the rich getting richer matters. If the economy is structured to funnel wealth continually upwards, then most of us simply end up spending our lives being shat upon.
read this thread, and tell me with all seriousness that life for the bottom 25% is 'worse' than it was 50 years ago. And that social mobility is worse.
Because they're better, not worse.
This doesn't mean we cannot improve things. It's just that 'poverty' might mean a very different thing to what it did back then.
Quite right. Why do we bother providing indoor toilets in social housing? Bloody ingrates.
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
I can still remember, as a child, hearing the adults ask each other: “Do you have a telephone?”
Meaning: do you have a telephone connection
The smartphone is surely the most important invention of the last 50 years
I became a teenager in 1986, the same year I started at a private school (so they were not too poor). My parents told me not to spend too long on the phone due to the cost, and because they might get an incoming call.
The world is the same as it was then, but also very different.
As a homesick teenage student at UCL in the 1980s, living in Halls of Residence, I can remember the queue to use one of the three pay phones in the Halls. Everyone jangling their change impatiently, then you got 5 minutes talking to your Mum or whatever. Telephonically no different from the experience of soldiers ringing home in WW2, or journalists waiting to call HQ in movies set in the 1930s
All is changed, changed utterly. An unspoken revolution
When I walked the Pennine Way in 1999, I carried a mobile phone. I also carried some phone cards for use in phone boxes. I don't know when they died out, but I have probably not seen one for well over 20 years.
My great-grandad was born in the 1870s and died in the 1960s. Think of the way the world changed for him: radio, TV, planes, cars, space travel, nuclear power, nuclear weapons, common travel, common international travel, etc, etc.
The rate of compressed change must have been staggering. But people coped.
And so shall we.
Interestingly, pre WWII international travel was remarkably common for Brits who wanted it.
If you were working class you could be posted all over the Empire in the armed forces, or emigrate pretty easily on ships around the world, and if you were middle class choose your posting.
My grandfather applied for the Canadian Mounties and when he didn't get that considered Australia before finally plumping for a posting as an electrical engineer in the Indian Army.
That's far less common now, and we are much more Eurocentric.
That’s what I’ve been told is happening by my source inside Starmer’s camp.
Well, I'm not sure what "your source" knows or thinks but there will be no overt pact, deal, arrangement or understanding between Labour and the LDs. Labour will fight every seat (bar the Speaker) while the LDs will fight every seat bar any which they have by-passed in favour of the Greens.
As to the amounts of activity by each party in any particular seat, that's not for me to say.
There was a good deal of tactical cooperation at the last election - for example, I live in SW Surrey, a LibDem target, and not far from Portsmouth, where a Labour MP was under siege from the Tories (and, preposterously, the LibDems, still claiming that only they could beat the Tories). I spent all my campaigning time in Portsmouth, which we held. I know LibDems in Croydon who voted Labour for the reverse reason.
I expect an increase in this sort of thing, as CHB suggests, though both parties will as you say stand everywhere. The idea will be that those who want to cast a positive vote for a party should be able to do so - not everyone is a willing tactical voter - but effort should reflect perceived genuine chances.
The Greens are not up for such considerations at Parliamentary level, and campaign wherever they can, regardless - as we see in both by-elections right now.
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
Average real wages in the UK will still be lower in 2026 than they were in 2008, analysis released by the Office Budget Responsibility (OBR) projects.
In the round people are obviously better off today than they were in 1972, but that's a pretty bloody low bar to be setting. And might one venture to suggest that an economic settlement in which the rich keep getting richer whilst Joe Average is basically left to rot until God alone knows when is somewhat sub-optimal?
What is a 'better' bar to be setting then? How much better off should people be?
Say we have one outlier; for example a person with three trillion pounds in wealth. Does that matter if a) (s)he has no real power over us, and b) we are all better off?
Why does the rich getting richer matter if the living standards of the rest of us increase?
And my *impression* is that social mobility is increasing, not decreasing. If you have talent, and the will, you can be successful. Much more so than in my dad's day.
The system does not work for most people if their incomes are stagnating for decades on end whilst the wealthy continue to get better off. What this implies is that the cake is still getting bigger but the privileged minority are getting a larger portion of it with every passing year. If that continues for long enough then we'll eventually end up back with a new iteration of the pre-modern economy, in which a small number of nobility and gentry basically receive money for nothing and everybody else is a peasant.
The living standards of the rest of us aren't increasing - the very poor have been getting poorer for many years, and now the process of immiseration is accelerating further up the income scale - and that's why the rich getting richer matters. If the economy is structured to funnel wealth continually upwards, then most of us simply end up spending our lives being shat upon.
read this thread, and tell me with all seriousness that life for the bottom 25% is 'worse' than it was 50 years ago. And that social mobility is worse.
Because they're better, not worse.
This doesn't mean we cannot improve things. It's just that 'poverty' might mean a very different thing to what it did back then.
By the way, social mobility is certainly much worse. Society started gumming up some time in the 80s or 90s.
Whether he survives in this week's Spectator is of less importance than whether he can survive as PM.
Seldon thinks Boris will be gone by spring, by one of three mechanisms: Sunak or Raab; the 1922; or Boris retiring (most likely imo).
Unless he is genuinely ill, no way does Boris retire.
Boris retiring allows him to go out as a winner, and a serial winner: from Eton and Oxford, to Parliament, Mayor of London, Brexit, now Prime Minister. He can claim a remarkable legacy: as Mayor, the Olympics and Boris bikes (both started by Ken but never mind); as Prime Minister, seeing us through Brexit and Covid.
Getting voted out by the 1922 or the wider electorate spoils his winning record, and it is hard to see anything that will add to his legacy — unless someone can think of some policies to reify the slogan levelling up. Today's announcement looks like a ragbag of reheated Thatcherite gimmicks; nothing solid there.
My guess would be Boris has half an eye on Harold Wilson's shocking retirement at 60 (and it really did take the country by surprise) which would take him to 2024 but maybe that looks a long way off now. Early 2023, after England wins the World Cup this December?
And this allows Boris to get seriously rich while still young enough to enjoy it.
As a homesick teenage student at UCL in the 1980s, living in Halls of Residence, I can remember the queue to use one of the three pay phones in the Halls. Everyone jangling their change impatiently, then you got 5 minutes talking to your Mum or whatever. Telephonically no different from the experience of soldiers ringing home in WW2, or journalists waiting to call HQ in movies set in the 1930s
All is changed, changed utterly. An unspoken revolution
When Mrs Stodge came over from New Zealand in 1991, her only communications with her parents in NZ were either letter or a weekly phone call which cost an arm and a leg.
Now, thanks to the much-derided Facetime or Teams, she can talk to her mother free for as long as she likes and it is as though they are in the same room.
As you rightly say, remarkable progress in 30 years - begs the question what the next 30 years might offer.
My sister in the early 80s in NZ - communication by mailed cassette-recordings.
I remember the very expensive calls, and also the half second delay.
The world is changing irrevocably before our eyes, yet few care to admit it.
We may indeed be witnessing the passing of an era, yet few are seeing it?
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
Average real wages in the UK will still be lower in 2026 than they were in 2008, analysis released by the Office Budget Responsibility (OBR) projects.
In the round people are obviously better off today than they were in 1972, but that's a pretty bloody low bar to be setting. And might one venture to suggest that an economic settlement in which the rich keep getting richer whilst Joe Average is basically left to rot until God alone knows when is somewhat sub-optimal?
What is a 'better' bar to be setting then? How much better off should people be?
Say we have one outlier; for example a person with three trillion pounds in wealth. Does that matter if a) (s)he has no real power over us, and b) we are all better off?
Why does the rich getting richer matter if the living standards of the rest of us increase?
And my *impression* is that social mobility is increasing, not decreasing. If you have talent, and the will, you can be successful. Much more so than in my dad's day.
The system does not work for most people if their incomes are stagnating for decades on end whilst the wealthy continue to get better off. What this implies is that the cake is still getting bigger but the privileged minority are getting a larger portion of it with every passing year. If that continues for long enough then we'll eventually end up back with a new iteration of the pre-modern economy, in which a small number of nobility and gentry basically receive money for nothing and everybody else is a peasant.
The living standards of the rest of us aren't increasing - the very poor have been getting poorer for many years, and now the process of immiseration is accelerating further up the income scale - and that's why the rich getting richer matters. If the economy is structured to funnel wealth continually upwards, then most of us simply end up spending our lives being shat upon.
read this thread, and tell me with all seriousness that life for the bottom 25% is 'worse' than it was 50 years ago. And that social mobility is worse.
Because they're better, not worse.
This doesn't mean we cannot improve things. It's just that 'poverty' might mean a very different thing to what it did back then.
Poverty in absolute terms is a fraction of what it was 50 years ago, you're right.
But social mobility? I'd be surprised if it's higher today than it was in 1972. There's an LSE blog about one definition of "social mobility" that shows it's fallen in a hole since the GFC.
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
I can still remember, as a child, hearing the adults ask each other: “Do you have a telephone?”
Meaning: do you have a telephone connection
The smartphone is surely the most important invention of the last 50 years
I became a teenager in 1986, the same year I started at a private school (so they were not too poor). My parents told me not to spend too long on the phone due to the cost, and because they might get an incoming call.
The world is the same as it was then, but also very different.
As a homesick teenage student at UCL in the 1980s, living in Halls of Residence, I can remember the queue to use one of the three pay phones in the Halls. Everyone jangling their change impatiently, then you got 5 minutes talking to your Mum or whatever. Telephonically no different from the experience of soldiers ringing home in WW2, or journalists waiting to call HQ in movies set in the 1930s
All is changed, changed utterly. An unspoken revolution
When I walked the Pennine Way in 1999, I carried a mobile phone. I also carried some phone cards for use in phone boxes. I don't know when they died out, but I have probably not seen one for well over 20 years.
My great-grandad was born in the 1870s and died in the 1960s. Think of the way the world changed for him: radio, TV, planes, cars, space travel, nuclear power, nuclear weapons, common travel, common international travel, etc, etc.
The rate of compressed change must have been staggering. But people coped.
And so shall we.
Interestingly, pre WWII international travel was remarkably common for Brits who wanted it.
If you were working class you could be posted all over the Empire in the armed forces, or emigrate pretty easily on ships around the world, and if you were middle class choose your posting.
My grandfather applied for the Canadian Mounties and when he didn't get that considered Australia before finally plumping for a posting as an electrical engineer in the Indian Army.
That's far less common now, and we are much more Eurocentric.
Aside from your last line (travelling to Europe *is* international travel), I hadn't thought of that. It's a really good point.
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
I can still remember, as a child, hearing the adults ask each other: “Do you have a telephone?”
Meaning: do you have a telephone connection
The smartphone is surely the most important invention of the last 50 years
I became a teenager in 1986, the same year I started at a private school (so they were not too poor). My parents told me not to spend too long on the phone due to the cost, and because they might get an incoming call.
The world is the same as it was then, but also very different.
As a homesick teenage student at UCL in the 1980s, living in Halls of Residence, I can remember the queue to use one of the three pay phones in the Halls. Everyone jangling their change impatiently, then you got 5 minutes talking to your Mum or whatever. Telephonically no different from the experience of soldiers ringing home in WW2, or journalists waiting to call HQ in movies set in the 1930s
All is changed, changed utterly. An unspoken revolution
I remember in the 60’s on a Saturday night people would queue outside the phone box to phone home to Scotland from Winchester. There was a strict etiquette. You did not hog the phone. You were respectful of others in the queue. You took your turn and no more. We have gained much but lost something too.
CH 4 News pointing out that Liz Truss encouraged British citizens to go and fight there. What a foolish thing for a Foreign Secretary to do. Jenrick seems to be rowing back but they have footage of her saying it. These incompetents cant do anything right.
Why was it foolish? Because it has given the Russians the excuse to use the death penalty?
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
I can still remember, as a child, hearing the adults ask each other: “Do you have a telephone?”
Meaning: do you have a telephone connection
The smartphone is surely the most important invention of the last 50 years
I became a teenager in 1986, the same year I started at a private school (so they were not too poor). My parents told me not to spend too long on the phone due to the cost, and because they might get an incoming call.
The world is the same as it was then, but also very different.
As a homesick teenage student at UCL in the 1980s, living in Halls of Residence, I can remember the queue to use one of the three pay phones in the Halls. Everyone jangling their change impatiently, then you got 5 minutes talking to your Mum or whatever. Telephonically no different from the experience of soldiers ringing home in WW2, or journalists waiting to call HQ in movies set in the 1930s
All is changed, changed utterly. An unspoken revolution
When I walked the Pennine Way in 1999, I carried a mobile phone. I also carried some phone cards for use in phone boxes. I don't know when they died out, but I have probably not seen one for well over 20 years.
My great-grandad was born in the 1870s and died in the 1960s. Think of the way the world changed for him: radio, TV, planes, cars, space travel, nuclear power, nuclear weapons, common travel, common international travel, etc, etc.
The rate of compressed change must have been staggering. But people coped.
And so shall we.
Interestingly, pre WWII international travel was remarkably common for Brits who wanted it.
If you were working class you could be posted all over the Empire in the armed forces, or emigrate pretty easily on ships around the world, and if you were middle class choose your posting.
My grandfather applied for the Canadian Mounties and when he didn't get that considered Australia before finally plumping for a posting as an electrical engineer in the Indian Army.
That's far less common now, and we are much more Eurocentric.
Here is a fascinating and funny 10-minute interview with an Irish ww1 veteran making a similar point: join the army to see the world ("and damn near saw the second world"). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWnc-ZlIo5s
A resurgent lib dems, is the last thing the Tories need to hear, that could spell big trouble for them if it continues
Let's put "resurgence" in context for a second.
The LibDems are polling 13% right now, maybe 14% in a poll or two.
That's well up on where they were in 2015 (7.9%) and 2017 (7.4%), but is only a couple of percent above 2019 (11.6%).
Let's assume that they continue to improve and get to 15-16% at the General Election, which is a not inconceivable scenario. Fuck it. Let's go with 16%.
Let's also assume that the Conservatives drop 10% on their 2019 vote share.
The LDs will win a bunch of seats: they'll capture Wimbledon, Cheltenham, Winchester, and at least half a dozen more seats.
But getting beyond about 25 seats (a more than doubling from 2019) is tough.
I don’t disagree with your conclusions, but have you properly factored in tactical voting against Tory incumbents, i.e, borrowed votes from Labour?
If there's a repeat of GROT* from 1997, then that could have a very major impact on results.
It'd be interesting to run a simulation where 50% of the third placed party (if LD or Lab) went for the challenger with the best chance of beating the Conservatives. If they have dropped to 35% in the polls *and* there's widespread tactical voting then it could be a bloodbath for them, and the LDs could see a repeat of the 1997 election when they saw their vote share drop, and their seats double.
That said... the move to new boundaries confuses things, and makes tactical voting harder.
* GROT: Get Rid of Them
Don't forget that in 1997 the Lib Dems polled only 16.8% for 46 seats. The Lib Dem seat tally tracks the Conservative vote share inversely much more strongly than the Lib Dem vote share, against which seat changes are nearly random.
That's a fair point. In the last four General Elections, the LibDem vote and seat counts have only moved in the same direction once - 2015.
Not the case at GE2019. Overall votes UP nearly 4% overall seats DOWN 1
Best was GE1997 when the LD vote share dropped 1.6% but their seat haul went up from 20 to 46.
Eh? That's exactly my point.
2010: votes up, seats down 2015: votes down, seats down 2017: votes down, seats up 2019: votes up, seats down
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
Average real wages in the UK will still be lower in 2026 than they were in 2008, analysis released by the Office Budget Responsibility (OBR) projects.
In the round people are obviously better off today than they were in 1972, but that's a pretty bloody low bar to be setting. And might one venture to suggest that an economic settlement in which the rich keep getting richer whilst Joe Average is basically left to rot until God alone knows when is somewhat sub-optimal?
What is a 'better' bar to be setting then? How much better off should people be?
Say we have one outlier; for example a person with three trillion pounds in wealth. Does that matter if a) (s)he has no real power over us, and b) we are all better off?
Why does the rich getting richer matter if the living standards of the rest of us increase?
And my *impression* is that social mobility is increasing, not decreasing. If you have talent, and the will, you can be successful. Much more so than in my dad's day.
The system does not work for most people if their incomes are stagnating for decades on end whilst the wealthy continue to get better off. What this implies is that the cake is still getting bigger but the privileged minority are getting a larger portion of it with every passing year. If that continues for long enough then we'll eventually end up back with a new iteration of the pre-modern economy, in which a small number of nobility and gentry basically receive money for nothing and everybody else is a peasant.
The living standards of the rest of us aren't increasing - the very poor have been getting poorer for many years, and now the process of immiseration is accelerating further up the income scale - and that's why the rich getting richer matters. If the economy is structured to funnel wealth continually upwards, then most of us simply end up spending our lives being shat upon.
read this thread, and tell me with all seriousness that life for the bottom 25% is 'worse' than it was 50 years ago. And that social mobility is worse.
Because they're better, not worse.
This doesn't mean we cannot improve things. It's just that 'poverty' might mean a very different thing to what it did back then.
Poverty in absolute terms is a fraction of what it was 50 years ago, you're right.
But social mobility? I'd be surprised if it's higher today than it was in 1972. There's an LSE blog about one definition of "social mobility" that shows it's fallen in a hole since the GFC.
Inequality is far higher than 50 years ago. Mental illness is also at much higher recorded levels, and there seems to be quite a lot of evidence connecting the two in various countries.
Last time Britain faced such major economic shocks, it had both much lower inequality and stronger community support networks, not just in the 1970's, but even through to the early 1980s.
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
I can still remember, as a child, hearing the adults ask each other: “Do you have a telephone?”
Meaning: do you have a telephone connection
The smartphone is surely the most important invention of the last 50 years
I became a teenager in 1986, the same year I started at a private school (so they were not too poor). My parents told me not to spend too long on the phone due to the cost, and because they might get an incoming call.
The world is the same as it was then, but also very different.
As a homesick teenage student at UCL in the 1980s, living in Halls of Residence, I can remember the queue to use one of the three pay phones in the Halls. Everyone jangling their change impatiently, then you got 5 minutes talking to your Mum or whatever. Telephonically no different from the experience of soldiers ringing home in WW2, or journalists waiting to call HQ in movies set in the 1930s
All is changed, changed utterly. An unspoken revolution
When I walked the Pennine Way in 1999, I carried a mobile phone. I also carried some phone cards for use in phone boxes. I don't know when they died out, but I have probably not seen one for well over 20 years.
My great-grandad was born in the 1870s and died in the 1960s. Think of the way the world changed for him: radio, TV, planes, cars, space travel, nuclear power, nuclear weapons, common travel, common international travel, etc, etc.
The rate of compressed change must have been staggering. But people coped.
And so shall we.
Interestingly, pre WWII international travel was remarkably common for Brits who wanted it.
If you were working class you could be posted all over the Empire in the armed forces, or emigrate pretty easily on ships around the world, and if you were middle class choose your posting.
My grandfather applied for the Canadian Mounties and when he didn't get that considered Australia before finally plumping for a posting as an electrical engineer in the Indian Army.
That's far less common now, and we are much more Eurocentric.
Aside from your last line (travelling to Europe *is* international travel), I hadn't thought of that. It's a really good point.
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
I can still remember, as a child, hearing the adults ask each other: “Do you have a telephone?”
Meaning: do you have a telephone connection
The smartphone is surely the most important invention of the last 50 years
I became a teenager in 1986, the same year I started at a private school (so they were not too poor). My parents told me not to spend too long on the phone due to the cost, and because they might get an incoming call.
The world is the same as it was then, but also very different.
As a homesick teenage student at UCL in the 1980s, living in Halls of Residence, I can remember the queue to use one of the three pay phones in the Halls. Everyone jangling their change impatiently, then you got 5 minutes talking to your Mum or whatever. Telephonically no different from the experience of soldiers ringing home in WW2, or journalists waiting to call HQ in movies set in the 1930s
All is changed, changed utterly. An unspoken revolution
I remember in the 60’s on a Saturday night people would queue outside the phone box to phone home to Scotland from Winchester. There was a strict etiquette. You did not hog the phone. You were respectful of others in the queue. You took your turn and no more. We have gained much but lost something too.
It was the same at university in 1996, on the cusp of the mobile revolution. By 1999, I had a mobile phone, but would still call my parents with the phone box number to call me back.
A couple of years later, this concept would have been totally alien to everyone.
That’s what I’ve been told is happening by my source inside Starmer’s camp.
Well, I'm not sure what "your source" knows or thinks but there will be no overt pact, deal, arrangement or understanding between Labour and the LDs. Labour will fight every seat (bar the Speaker) while the LDs will fight every seat bar any which they have by-passed in favour of the Greens.
As to the amounts of activity by each party in any particular seat, that's not for me to say.
There was a good deal of tactical cooperation at the last election - for example, I live in SW Surrey, a LibDem target, and not far from Portsmouth, where a Labour MP was under siege from the Tories (and, preposterously, the LibDems, still claiming that only they could beat the Tories). I spent all my campaigning time in Portsmouth, which we held. I know LibDems in Croydon who voted Labour for the reverse reason.
I expect an increase in this sort of thing, as CHB suggests, though both parties will as you say stand everywhere. The idea will be that those who want to cast a positive vote for a party should be able to do so - not everyone is a willing tactical voter - but effort should reflect perceived genuine chances.
The Greens are not up for such considerations at Parliamentary level, and campaign wherever they can, regardless - as we see in both by-elections right now.
Here in East Ham, of course, anti-Tory tactical voting isn't much of a consideration. The Greens may well end up finishing second.
The relationship between LD parliamentary strength and local council strength remains pretty strong, I'd venture. Whether that will be enough in Guildford or Woking remains to be seen.
As for the Greens, theirs is a more complex situation - some "deals" with the LDs exist but in other areas the relationship is much more adversarial.
As an aside, we're seeing in Europe the emergence of new Green-based parties of the left and centre such as Golob's in Slovenia and the NUPES bloc in the French legislative elections. Past history might caution Labour against getting too close to an emerging progressive movement but it could be the political direction for the mid 21st century if you see environmental policy as a potential dividing line.
Whether he survives in this week's Spectator is of less importance than whether he can survive as PM.
Seldon thinks Boris will be gone by spring, by one of three mechanisms: Sunak or Raab; the 1922; or Boris retiring (most likely imo).
Unless he is genuinely ill, no way does Boris retire.
Boris retiring allows him to go out as a winner, and a serial winner: from Eton and Oxford, to Parliament, Mayor of London, Brexit, now Prime Minister. He can claim a remarkable legacy: as Mayor, the Olympics and Boris bikes (both started by Ken but never mind); as Prime Minister, seeing us through Brexit and Covid.
Getting voted out by the 1922 or the wider electorate spoils his winning record, and it is hard to see anything that will add to his legacy — unless someone can think of some policies to reify the slogan levelling up. Today's announcement looks like a ragbag of reheated Thatcherite gimmicks; nothing solid there.
My guess would be Boris has half an eye on Harold Wilson's shocking retirement at 60 (and it really did take the country by surprise) which would take him to 2024 but maybe that looks a long way off now. Early 2023, after England wins the World Cup this December?
And this allows Boris to get seriously rich while still young enough to enjoy it.
He has enough sycophants in the HoC to keep him going for as long as he wants. Additionally, I am sure he has some chicanery up his sleeve to see him through the next election even if he personally remains unpopular.
I don't believe he has any desire to leave the wallpaper and curtains for anyone else to endure, I mean enjoy.
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
Average real wages in the UK will still be lower in 2026 than they were in 2008, analysis released by the Office Budget Responsibility (OBR) projects.
In the round people are obviously better off today than they were in 1972, but that's a pretty bloody low bar to be setting. And might one venture to suggest that an economic settlement in which the rich keep getting richer whilst Joe Average is basically left to rot until God alone knows when is somewhat sub-optimal?
What is a 'better' bar to be setting then? How much better off should people be?
Say we have one outlier; for example a person with three trillion pounds in wealth. Does that matter if a) (s)he has no real power over us, and b) we are all better off?
Why does the rich getting richer matter if the living standards of the rest of us increase?
And my *impression* is that social mobility is increasing, not decreasing. If you have talent, and the will, you can be successful. Much more so than in my dad's day.
The system does not work for most people if their incomes are stagnating for decades on end whilst the wealthy continue to get better off. What this implies is that the cake is still getting bigger but the privileged minority are getting a larger portion of it with every passing year. If that continues for long enough then we'll eventually end up back with a new iteration of the pre-modern economy, in which a small number of nobility and gentry basically receive money for nothing and everybody else is a peasant.
The living standards of the rest of us aren't increasing - the very poor have been getting poorer for many years, and now the process of immiseration is accelerating further up the income scale - and that's why the rich getting richer matters. If the economy is structured to funnel wealth continually upwards, then most of us simply end up spending our lives being shat upon.
read this thread, and tell me with all seriousness that life for the bottom 25% is 'worse' than it was 50 years ago. And that social mobility is worse.
Because they're better, not worse.
This doesn't mean we cannot improve things. It's just that 'poverty' might mean a very different thing to what it did back then.
By the way, social mobility is certainly much worse. Society started gumming up some time in the 80s or 90s.
Indeed. And what is the Government's latest wheeze for trying to deal with this? Why, sub-prime mortgages for housing benefit claimants. What could possibly go wrong?
(They don't give a flying fuck about social mobility, of course. The sooner more social housing is liberated from councils and housing associations, the sooner it can find its way into the portfolios of buy-to-let landlords.)
If you cut fuel duty you reduce the incentive for people to switch to electric cars and you support a higher level of demand for fuel - this will lead to an increase in the price of fuel until a higher price forces demand down again to bring demand and supply into balance.
It's pissing into the wind of a supply shock.
What's the electric car market like at the moment? Anecdotally I know of someone who ordered a VW electric in Autumn last year who has not had it delivered yet. If there's a supply-side restriction, fuel price won't matter as much.
Besides, electric cars cost so much nowadays that I doubt fuel costs are really much of an incentive. Bragging rights probably count for much more.
(Speaking of which, we might need to change our 10-year old VW Passat soon. I haven't really looked into it, but would consider electric, but prefer to buy second-hand which might be a problem...)
Not sure buying EVs secondhand is wise at the best of times. Much/most of their value is in their batteries. How do you know that a secondhand battery isn't going to conk out on you in short order? A new vehicle under long warranty on PCP is probably the sweet spot.
Yeah, that's the big issue I have with buying a second-hand electric. But I'm too tight to buy a new one at the sort of price they are now (they are really expensive, and driving is just a tool for me; I don't particularly enjoy it).
I might consider leasing one, though, even though we could buy new.
Tesla are offering 8-year battery warranties, but there are horror stories of (last-generation) batteries failing just outside that time. Awesome if it fails just inside though. It does make one think twice about a second-hand one though, which may be really close to the original retail price at three years old, but could be worth very little at six or seven.
This is something I’ve just thought about more, and it’s a profound and fundamental change.
With an ICE car, the first owner suffers the heavy depreciation, and generally buy on finance. The second owner generally buys with cash or a personal loan, and suffers a smaller depreciation.
With an EV, this might get reversed. The second owner, buying the three-year-old EV, is going to take the depreciation hit on the car. The life of the battery is much more dependent on how it’s been treated by the first owner, than an engine would be except in the most extreme circumstances.
This will have a huge effect on how car purchases are funded in the coming decade.
It is worth remembering that EV batteries - while they may be useless for EVs after eight years - are still very valuable. Nissan, for example, sells their batteries on for use in home battery backup systems where the 20% capacity reduction is of no great consequence. (As space and weight don't matter, you just buy 20% more batteries.)
Yes, but these things are relative.
Ask the guy who paid $30k for an old Model S, why he needs to pay $20k more for a new battery to make his car work. That the old battery might be worth $5k or so, to a recycler, barely factors into the equation.
(Yes, there will be 3rd party battery repair shops in the future, but Tesla can (and does) already ban any car with a 3rd-party repair from the Supercharger network).
If Tesla wants to make super margins on battery replacement, then people will buy other EVs.
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
Average real wages in the UK will still be lower in 2026 than they were in 2008, analysis released by the Office Budget Responsibility (OBR) projects.
In the round people are obviously better off today than they were in 1972, but that's a pretty bloody low bar to be setting. And might one venture to suggest that an economic settlement in which the rich keep getting richer whilst Joe Average is basically left to rot until God alone knows when is somewhat sub-optimal?
What is a 'better' bar to be setting then? How much better off should people be?
Say we have one outlier; for example a person with three trillion pounds in wealth. Does that matter if a) (s)he has no real power over us, and b) we are all better off?
Why does the rich getting richer matter if the living standards of the rest of us increase?
And my *impression* is that social mobility is increasing, not decreasing. If you have talent, and the will, you can be successful. Much more so than in my dad's day.
The system does not work for most people if their incomes are stagnating for decades on end whilst the wealthy continue to get better off. What this implies is that the cake is still getting bigger but the privileged minority are getting a larger portion of it with every passing year. If that continues for long enough then we'll eventually end up back with a new iteration of the pre-modern economy, in which a small number of nobility and gentry basically receive money for nothing and everybody else is a peasant.
The living standards of the rest of us aren't increasing - the very poor have been getting poorer for many years, and now the process of immiseration is accelerating further up the income scale - and that's why the rich getting richer matters. If the economy is structured to funnel wealth continually upwards, then most of us simply end up spending our lives being shat upon.
The “wealthy” are 20-30% down this year, as most of their wealth is tied up in the stock markets.
Now, someone who was worth $300m and is now worth $200m, isn’t going to be struggling to pay their cleaner, but the downturn does affect business at a macro level.
CH 4 News pointing out that Liz Truss encouraged British citizens to go and fight there. What a foolish thing for a Foreign Secretary to do. Jenrick seems to be rowing back but they have footage of her saying it. These incompetents cant do anything right.
It's irresponsible of them to try to make something of that. The people who were put on 'trial' by the DNR had been long-term Ukrainian residents with dual citizenship.
Exactly. So why did she give them so much ammunition? She's being quoted all over the place. Sensible people were warning at the time that it would come back to bite her but her name in lights trumped everything with Liz
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
Average real wages in the UK will still be lower in 2026 than they were in 2008, analysis released by the Office Budget Responsibility (OBR) projects.
In the round people are obviously better off today than they were in 1972, but that's a pretty bloody low bar to be setting. And might one venture to suggest that an economic settlement in which the rich keep getting richer whilst Joe Average is basically left to rot until God alone knows when is somewhat sub-optimal?
What is a 'better' bar to be setting then? How much better off should people be?
Say we have one outlier; for example a person with three trillion pounds in wealth. Does that matter if a) (s)he has no real power over us, and b) we are all better off?
Why does the rich getting richer matter if the living standards of the rest of us increase?
And my *impression* is that social mobility is increasing, not decreasing. If you have talent, and the will, you can be successful. Much more so than in my dad's day.
The system does not work for most people if their incomes are stagnating for decades on end whilst the wealthy continue to get better off. What this implies is that the cake is still getting bigger but the privileged minority are getting a larger portion of it with every passing year. If that continues for long enough then we'll eventually end up back with a new iteration of the pre-modern economy, in which a small number of nobility and gentry basically receive money for nothing and everybody else is a peasant.
The living standards of the rest of us aren't increasing - the very poor have been getting poorer for many years, and now the process of immiseration is accelerating further up the income scale - and that's why the rich getting richer matters. If the economy is structured to funnel wealth continually upwards, then most of us simply end up spending our lives being shat upon.
The “wealthy” are 20-30% down this year, as most of their wealth is tied up in the stock markets.
Now, someone who was worth $300m and is now worth $200m, isn’t going to be struggling to pay their cleaner, but the downturn does affect business at a macro level.
Cut VAT on fuel to 0%, cut fuel duty for a year. Labour should back it.
Doesn't really fit with the zero carbon agenda though. There is a significant interest which is quite pleased with high fuel prices because it pushes people away from the internal combustion engine. Not saying I back this approach (though I have some nuanced sympathy for it) - but it doesn't fit in with Labour's general approach to transport and the environment.
Yes. I've definitely been driving less since the fuel prices rose. Biking more and catching the bus in marginal situations rather than jumping in the car. Enjoying it. Cars are more hassle than they are worth round here much of the time, trying to park etc. Just force of habit pushes me into it normally.
That can't be true. I've been assured that demand for fuel is price inelastic.
Not everyone lives in London
Not everyone has to reduce their use to reduce overall demand.
Honestly not seeking to trigger another debate on how easy/hard it is getting into the EU, or if it’s racist calling someone a gammon, it just made me chuckle.
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
Average real wages in the UK will still be lower in 2026 than they were in 2008, analysis released by the Office Budget Responsibility (OBR) projects.
In the round people are obviously better off today than they were in 1972, but that's a pretty bloody low bar to be setting. And might one venture to suggest that an economic settlement in which the rich keep getting richer whilst Joe Average is basically left to rot until God alone knows when is somewhat sub-optimal?
What is a 'better' bar to be setting then? How much better off should people be?
Say we have one outlier; for example a person with three trillion pounds in wealth. Does that matter if a) (s)he has no real power over us, and b) we are all better off?
Why does the rich getting richer matter if the living standards of the rest of us increase?
And my *impression* is that social mobility is increasing, not decreasing. If you have talent, and the will, you can be successful. Much more so than in my dad's day.
The system does not work for most people if their incomes are stagnating for decades on end whilst the wealthy continue to get better off. What this implies is that the cake is still getting bigger but the privileged minority are getting a larger portion of it with every passing year. If that continues for long enough then we'll eventually end up back with a new iteration of the pre-modern economy, in which a small number of nobility and gentry basically receive money for nothing and everybody else is a peasant.
The living standards of the rest of us aren't increasing - the very poor have been getting poorer for many years, and now the process of immiseration is accelerating further up the income scale - and that's why the rich getting richer matters. If the economy is structured to funnel wealth continually upwards, then most of us simply end up spending our lives being shat upon.
read this thread, and tell me with all seriousness that life for the bottom 25% is 'worse' than it was 50 years ago. And that social mobility is worse.
Because they're better, not worse.
This doesn't mean we cannot improve things. It's just that 'poverty' might mean a very different thing to what it did back then.
Poverty in absolute terms is a fraction of what it was 50 years ago, you're right.
But social mobility? I'd be surprised if it's higher today than it was in 1972. There's an LSE blog about one definition of "social mobility" that shows it's fallen in a hole since the GFC.
I'm far from convinced that is true. Taking politics, look at the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party. I'm not Rayner's greatest fan, but there's very little chance someone of her background would have been an MP, let alone hold the position she does now, in the 1970s.
Or even the much-maligned Deputy PM. Looking at the current cabinet, and at backgrounds, there's probably little chance Patel, Truss, Dorries, Sharma and others would have made a government cabinet in the 1970s; not just because of their (lack of) skills, but because their faces probably would not have fitted.
And I see it in the wider world. I know someone who, whilst at school in the late 1970s, was told that there was little point educating him as he would just end up working at the local mine. Which he did. If that happened nowadays it would be a minor scandal.
IMV we, as individuals, have far more opportunities than we did in the past.
Social mobility is not just about men or class ...
< Interestingly, pre WWII international travel was remarkably common for Brits who wanted it.
If you were working class you could be posted all over the Empire in the armed forces, or emigrate pretty easily on ships around the world, and if you were middle class choose your posting.
My grandfather applied for the Canadian Mounties and when he didn't get that considered Australia before finally plumping for a posting as an electrical engineer in the Indian Army.
That's far less common now, and we are much more Eurocentric.
Even after WW2, National service meant many young men were widely travelled. My father joined up in 1946 and went to Germany and Japan. My mother never travelled abroad.
You had the "£10 Poms" as the post-war wave of emigration to Australia was concerned while Mrs Stodge's Mum and Dad went to NZ because her Dad was a GPO Engineer and the NZ equivalent offered him a job and land on which to build a house.
Oh god, I was too slow to leave the room and caught his piggy vacant face gurning something about "turning benefits into bricks".
Please someone make it stop.
It all looks so desperate and insincere. That’s the problem now for Johnson , who is going to believe anything he has to say . He’s become toxic to a large section of the public . Some Tory MPs seem to not get it , no amount of alleged popular policies are going to change the fact that he’s a liar and really doesn’t give a fig about most people . All he cares about is himself and hanging onto the keys of no 10.
And most think he would sell his own grannie if it meant keeping his job .
If you cut fuel duty you reduce the incentive for people to switch to electric cars and you support a higher level of demand for fuel - this will lead to an increase in the price of fuel until a higher price forces demand down again to bring demand and supply into balance.
It's pissing into the wind of a supply shock.
What's the electric car market like at the moment? Anecdotally I know of someone who ordered a VW electric in Autumn last year who has not had it delivered yet. If there's a supply-side restriction, fuel price won't matter as much.
Besides, electric cars cost so much nowadays that I doubt fuel costs are really much of an incentive. Bragging rights probably count for much more.
(Speaking of which, we might need to change our 10-year old VW Passat soon. I haven't really looked into it, but would consider electric, but prefer to buy second-hand which might be a problem...)
Not sure buying EVs secondhand is wise at the best of times. Much/most of their value is in their batteries. How do you know that a secondhand battery isn't going to conk out on you in short order? A new vehicle under long warranty on PCP is probably the sweet spot.
Yeah, that's the big issue I have with buying a second-hand electric. But I'm too tight to buy a new one at the sort of price they are now (they are really expensive, and driving is just a tool for me; I don't particularly enjoy it).
I might consider leasing one, though, even though we could buy new.
Tesla are offering 8-year battery warranties, but there are horror stories of (last-generation) batteries failing just outside that time. Awesome if it fails just inside though. It does make one think twice about a second-hand one though, which may be really close to the original retail price at three years old, but could be worth very little at six or seven.
This is something I’ve just thought about more, and it’s a profound and fundamental change.
With an ICE car, the first owner suffers the heavy depreciation, and generally buy on finance. The second owner generally buys with cash or a personal loan, and suffers a smaller depreciation.
With an EV, this might get reversed. The second owner, buying the three-year-old EV, is going to take the depreciation hit on the car. The life of the battery is much more dependent on how it’s been treated by the first owner, than an engine would be except in the most extreme circumstances.
This will have a huge effect on how car purchases are funded in the coming decade.
It is worth remembering that EV batteries - while they may be useless for EVs after eight years - are still very valuable. Nissan, for example, sells their batteries on for use in home battery backup systems where the 20% capacity reduction is of no great consequence. (As space and weight don't matter, you just buy 20% more batteries.)
Yes, but these things are relative.
Ask the guy who paid $30k for an old Model S, why he needs to pay $20k more for a new battery to make his car work. That the old battery might be worth $5k or so, to a recycler, barely factors into the equation.
(Yes, there will be 3rd party battery repair shops in the future, but Tesla can (and does) already ban any car with a 3rd-party repair from the Supercharger network).
If Tesla wants to make super margins on battery replacement, then people will buy other EVs.
Tesla doesn’t care, they’d be over the moon if every 8-year-old car became worthless overnight, as it would help their new car sales.
They think like Apple, have no interest in supporting anything beyond a regulatory limit.
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
Average real wages in the UK will still be lower in 2026 than they were in 2008, analysis released by the Office Budget Responsibility (OBR) projects.
In the round people are obviously better off today than they were in 1972, but that's a pretty bloody low bar to be setting. And might one venture to suggest that an economic settlement in which the rich keep getting richer whilst Joe Average is basically left to rot until God alone knows when is somewhat sub-optimal?
What is a 'better' bar to be setting then? How much better off should people be?
Say we have one outlier; for example a person with three trillion pounds in wealth. Does that matter if a) (s)he has no real power over us, and b) we are all better off?
Why does the rich getting richer matter if the living standards of the rest of us increase?
And my *impression* is that social mobility is increasing, not decreasing. If you have talent, and the will, you can be successful. Much more so than in my dad's day.
The system does not work for most people if their incomes are stagnating for decades on end whilst the wealthy continue to get better off. What this implies is that the cake is still getting bigger but the privileged minority are getting a larger portion of it with every passing year. If that continues for long enough then we'll eventually end up back with a new iteration of the pre-modern economy, in which a small number of nobility and gentry basically receive money for nothing and everybody else is a peasant.
The living standards of the rest of us aren't increasing - the very poor have been getting poorer for many years, and now the process of immiseration is accelerating further up the income scale - and that's why the rich getting richer matters. If the economy is structured to funnel wealth continually upwards, then most of us simply end up spending our lives being shat upon.
The “wealthy” are 20-30% down this year, as most of their wealth is tied up in the stock markets.
Now, someone who was worth $300m and is now worth $200m, isn’t going to be struggling to pay their cleaner, but the downturn does affect business at a macro level.
Whether he survives in this week's Spectator is of less importance than whether he can survive as PM.
Seldon thinks Boris will be gone by spring, by one of three mechanisms: Sunak or Raab; the 1922; or Boris retiring (most likely imo).
Unless he is genuinely ill, no way does Boris retire.
Boris retiring allows him to go out as a winner, and a serial winner: from Eton and Oxford, to Parliament, Mayor of London, Brexit, now Prime Minister. He can claim a remarkable legacy: as Mayor, the Olympics and Boris bikes (both started by Ken but never mind); as Prime Minister, seeing us through Brexit and Covid.
Getting voted out by the 1922 or the wider electorate spoils his winning record, and it is hard to see anything that will add to his legacy — unless someone can think of some policies to reify the slogan levelling up. Today's announcement looks like a ragbag of reheated Thatcherite gimmicks; nothing solid there.
My guess would be Boris has half an eye on Harold Wilson's shocking retirement at 60 (and it really did take the country by surprise) which would take him to 2024 but maybe that looks a long way off now. Early 2023, after England wins the World Cup this December?
And this allows Boris to get seriously rich while still young enough to enjoy it.
He has enough sycophants in the HoC to keep him going for as long as he wants. Additionally, I am sure he has some chicanery up his sleeve to see him through the next election even if he personally remains unpopular.
I don't believe he has any desire to leave the wallpaper and curtains for anyone else to endure, I mean enjoy.
Yes, we sort of agree. My point is that Boris will choose to retire for the reasons stated; I agree with you that he will be forced out — pace the Privileges Committee.
And I hope the first action of the new Prime Minister is to invite a camera crew into the flat so we can see this bloody wallpaper.
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
I can still remember, as a child, hearing the adults ask each other: “Do you have a telephone?”
Meaning: do you have a telephone connection
The smartphone is surely the most important invention of the last 50 years
I became a teenager in 1986, the same year I started at a private school (so they were not too poor). My parents told me not to spend too long on the phone due to the cost, and because they might get an incoming call.
The world is the same as it was then, but also very different.
As a homesick teenage student at UCL in the 1980s, living in Halls of Residence, I can remember the queue to use one of the three pay phones in the Halls. Everyone jangling their change impatiently, then you got 5 minutes talking to your Mum or whatever. Telephonically no different from the experience of soldiers ringing home in WW2, or journalists waiting to call HQ in movies set in the 1930s
All is changed, changed utterly. An unspoken revolution
When I walked the Pennine Way in 1999, I carried a mobile phone. I also carried some phone cards for use in phone boxes. I don't know when they died out, but I have probably not seen one for well over 20 years.
My great-grandad was born in the 1870s and died in the 1960s. Think of the way the world changed for him: radio, TV, planes, cars, space travel, nuclear power, nuclear weapons, common travel, common international travel, etc, etc.
The rate of compressed change must have been staggering. But people coped.
And so shall we.
Interestingly, pre WWII international travel was remarkably common for Brits who wanted it.
If you were working class you could be posted all over the Empire in the armed forces, or emigrate pretty easily on ships around the world, and if you were middle class choose your posting.
My grandfather applied for the Canadian Mounties and when he didn't get that considered Australia before finally plumping for a posting as an electrical engineer in the Indian Army.
That's far less common now, and we are much more Eurocentric.
I think this is something that was missing from the whole debate over immigration. Cameron's policy was always to reduce net migration to below 100,000, which opened up the possibility of achieving that, not by restricting immigration, but by encouraging emigration.
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
You can't be serious! Maybe in Paookaville but not if you were living anywhere interesting. Everyone was much freer in the 70's. One of those rare times where poverty was more attractive than vulgar wealth and people gave a damn.
A resurgent lib dems, is the last thing the Tories need to hear, that could spell big trouble for them if it continues
Let's put "resurgence" in context for a second.
The LibDems are polling 13% right now, maybe 14% in a poll or two.
That's well up on where they were in 2015 (7.9%) and 2017 (7.4%), but is only a couple of percent above 2019 (11.6%).
Let's assume that they continue to improve and get to 15-16% at the General Election, which is a not inconceivable scenario. Fuck it. Let's go with 16%.
Let's also assume that the Conservatives drop 10% on their 2019 vote share.
The LDs will win a bunch of seats: they'll capture Wimbledon, Cheltenham, Winchester, and at least half a dozen more seats.
But getting beyond about 25 seats (a more than doubling from 2019) is tough.
I don’t disagree with your conclusions, but have you properly factored in tactical voting against Tory incumbents, i.e, borrowed votes from Labour?
If there's a repeat of GROT* from 1997, then that could have a very major impact on results.
It'd be interesting to run a simulation where 50% of the third placed party (if LD or Lab) went for the challenger with the best chance of beating the Conservatives. If they have dropped to 35% in the polls *and* there's widespread tactical voting then it could be a bloodbath for them, and the LDs could see a repeat of the 1997 election when they saw their vote share drop, and their seats double.
That said... the move to new boundaries confuses things, and makes tactical voting harder.
* GROT: Get Rid of Them
Don't forget that in 1997 the Lib Dems polled only 16.8% for 46 seats. The Lib Dem seat tally tracks the Conservative vote share inversely much more strongly than the Lib Dem vote share, against which seat changes are nearly random.
That's a fair point. In the last four General Elections, the LibDem vote and seat counts have only moved in the same direction once - 2015.
Not the case at GE2019. Overall votes UP nearly 4% overall seats DOWN 1
Best was GE1997 when the LD vote share dropped 1.6% but their seat haul went up from 20 to 46.
Eh? That's exactly my point.
2010: votes up, seats down 2015: votes down, seats down 2017: votes down, seats up 2019: votes up, seats down
Regardless, but the point that matters is that the LD seat share goes up when the Con share goes down relative to the LD share. And I think that can be safely relied upon whether the next GE's in 2022, 2023, 2024 or Jan 2025.
An additional factor is the extent to which LD and Labour supporters are willing to vote for each other's parties in potential tactical situations. I think that could be very considerable at the next GE, to the extent that it starts to hinder the Conservatives' ability to translate their polling numbers into a disproportionately high number of seats. The factors that held back that willingness (i.e. bitter Labour memories of Clegg, Corbyn's takeover putting off LDs) have waned or gone. At the same time we're seeing tacit cooperation between the two parties in the form of token campaigns only in the seats the other wants to win.
I think that in the two forthcoming by-elections, the aggregate increase in the Lab and LD vote shares will be quite modest. But because each party's votes will be more efficiently concentrated than hitherto, we will still see two stonking great Conservative losses.
Does anyone still think Boris will increase his majority at the next election?
He will not be fighting it
You say this with such confidence, even though you said Johnson would lose the VONC too
I am with the 148 and will do everything to see Boris out of office and support the aims of the 148 100%.
I have e mailed my mp who voted for Boris accordingly and affirmed my support for Penny Mordaunt
The longer the polls are bad the less likely he is to survive, and do not underestimate the conservative party's desire for power and reinvention
They never got rid of Major
I would just say that if Boris leads into GE24 he will have had to have a remarkable recovery in popularity otherwise the 148 will see him gone on good time
BigG. I told you earlier 148 (or for that matter anything less than 180 gets you nowhere). You need another 32 to change their mind. They will not.
Anyway in a week or two's time you will be cheering Starmer's FPN and resignation to the rafters and explaining it was a far more egregious breach of the rules than anything Johnson was involved with. I can forward my letter from Alun Cairns for you to brush up on your Johnsonian eulogies.
Oh god, I was too slow to leave the room and caught his piggy vacant face gurning something about "turning benefits into bricks".
Please someone make it stop.
It all looks so desperate and insincere. That’s the problem now for Johnson , who is going to believe anything he has to say . He’s become toxic to a large section of the public . Some Tory MPs seem to not get it , no amount of alleged popular policies are going to change the fact that he’s a liar and really doesn’t give a fig about most people . All he cares about is himself and hanging onto the keys of no 10.
And most think he would sell his own grannie if it meant keeping his job .
An incredibly accurate summing up of last night's discussion amongst a group of us at the local pub.
A resurgent lib dems, is the last thing the Tories need to hear, that could spell big trouble for them if it continues
Let's put "resurgence" in context for a second.
The LibDems are polling 13% right now, maybe 14% in a poll or two.
That's well up on where they were in 2015 (7.9%) and 2017 (7.4%), but is only a couple of percent above 2019 (11.6%).
Let's assume that they continue to improve and get to 15-16% at the General Election, which is a not inconceivable scenario. Fuck it. Let's go with 16%.
Let's also assume that the Conservatives drop 10% on their 2019 vote share.
The LDs will win a bunch of seats: they'll capture Wimbledon, Cheltenham, Winchester, and at least half a dozen more seats.
But getting beyond about 25 seats (a more than doubling from 2019) is tough.
I don’t disagree with your conclusions, but have you properly factored in tactical voting against Tory incumbents, i.e, borrowed votes from Labour?
If there's a repeat of GROT* from 1997, then that could have a very major impact on results.
It'd be interesting to run a simulation where 50% of the third placed party (if LD or Lab) went for the challenger with the best chance of beating the Conservatives. If they have dropped to 35% in the polls *and* there's widespread tactical voting then it could be a bloodbath for them, and the LDs could see a repeat of the 1997 election when they saw their vote share drop, and their seats double.
That said... the move to new boundaries confuses things, and makes tactical voting harder.
* GROT: Get Rid of Them
Don't forget that in 1997 the Lib Dems polled only 16.8% for 46 seats. The Lib Dem seat tally tracks the Conservative vote share inversely much more strongly than the Lib Dem vote share, against which seat changes are nearly random.
That's a fair point. In the last four General Elections, the LibDem vote and seat counts have only moved in the same direction once - 2015.
Not the case at GE2019. Overall votes UP nearly 4% overall seats DOWN 1
Best was GE1997 when the LD vote share dropped 1.6% but their seat haul went up from 20 to 46.
Eh? That's exactly my point.
2010: votes up, seats down 2015: votes down, seats down 2017: votes down, seats up 2019: votes up, seats down
If you look at the LD seat to vote share ratio since 1992 then the peak was in 2001:
The big challenge for the LDs is that in 2001 they were the 3rd largest party of 3 main parties. Now they are in a second tier of 5 behind the big 2 (LD, SNP, Plaid, Green, Reform).
Even maxing out tactical voting, if they are still only on 10% national vote share they'll probably only get around 25 seats
Honestly not seeking to trigger another debate on how easy/hard it is getting into the EU, or if it’s racist calling someone a gammon, it just made me chuckle.
Sometimes I think the whole 'going on holiday' thing and passport queues will actually be what does for Brexit.
I’ll keep saying it. A huge amount of the inflation is coming from fuel prices. It costs £2bn a month to scrap fuel duty, 52p a litre, and it can be done overnight.
A huge amount of the cost comes back, by reducing inflationary pressure everywhere in the economy. It still makes petrol £1.20 or £1.30, which is where it was only a few months ago - but most importantly, it tells the country that the government is listening to them about the cost of living.
But theyll wait till they are sub 30 and its been proposed by Reeves.
The problem is that all the policymakers live in central London, and don’t care themselves about the cost of petrol on a daily basis.
They really should care about it though, because the cost of transport fuels feed back into absolutely everything else.
Yes, get petrol down to 'normal' and it will dwarf partygate in the polls. The only Tory leads from 95 to 2001 were the fuel protests. Petrol is the ballgame.
It’s the sort of policy that’s worth a 10-point swing in the polls in a week. Tell the country that you understand there’s a problem, that it’s a temporary problem, and that here is a bunch of relief while that problem persists.
The government has to wean itself off fuel duty anyway, may as well do it now when it’s politically prudent and massively popular. They can always bring it back as the oil price falls.
Bonus points if the green-minded Labour party oppose the cut.
The pain at the pump is all any of my friends outside of London talk about. Hard not to, when it's going up almost daily.
People have moved on from partygate. What they see is a government that apparently doesn't have any answers to the cost of living crisis.
The only light for the government is that such observations among my friends are usually followed up by "the other lot don't have a clue what to do, either".
I hear people complaining about fuel prices and access to health services. I was earwhigging to a bloke in the supermarket the other day moaning about how hard it is to get through to a doctors surgery to speak to someone, never mind get an appointment. 'They keep telling me to go online. I don't want to go online, why can't I just ring up and speak to someone and get an appointment that day like I used to?'
Oh, and the price of everything going up generally.
All this will sink the Tories, assuming this is being felt right across the country. Which it sounds like it is. That's what the vast majority of people who don't give two hoots about politics are worrying about.
Partygate and the aftermath cut through and sure people think Johnson's a lying buffoon, but people will vote on the above.
And it isn't going to get any easier. If we have a 70s redux this winter - stagflation, energy rationing, hell maybe even strikes - which some are forecasting, then they're done. Finito. Kaput.
I don't think Johnson's legacy is going to be looked on with any fondness in 10 years' time. In 20 years time I think we'll look back at it as a catastrophe.
I've been predicting a return to widespread industrial action for some time. I hope that I'm right. I have developed a growing conviction that it is justifiable in most cases and is to be welcomed.
The balance of economic and, therefore, political power in Britain has swung massively away from ordinary workers and towards a lucky and pampered generation of elderly homeowners and the downright rich. It's therefore high time that we had significant redistribution from the wealthy to the struggling.
We are never going to get that from the Tories because they only exist to transfer resources upwards. As far as I'm concerned, if strikes are going to both force bosses to heel and hasten the destruction of the current Government then they are to be celebrated twice over. Bring them on.
They will hasten the destruction of everyone's lives, incomes and see rocketing unemployment
The strongest may try to hold the country to ransom, but this is the one time I am pleased we have a government who will resist unaffordable pay increases
You can wish it away but the fact is everyone across the western world is going to be poorer, and it is HMG responsibility to protect the poorest - it cannot protect everyone including well paid train drivers
No, it is not true that "everyone across the western world is going to be poorer". The very rich will not be poorer. They never are. They are the strongest, not the unions.
That's simply not true.
The difference between the very rich and most people is that (for the ultra rich) a 50% reduction in the value of their portfolios affects their life not one jot. They have become absolutely a lot poorer, but the impact on their lives will be almost non-existent.
My heart bleeds. I haven't seen evidence, however, of the very rich losing significant chunks of their portfolios.
Well, Elon has lost tens of billions with the Tesla share price down from $1,250 to $750.
The Nasdaq has fallen from 16,000 to 12,000. That's a 25% drop. So he won't be the only one.
My point is not that the uber-rich aren't extremely well insulated (they are), but that in percentage terms they do lose out, and it is incorrect to claim that they are getting richer.
Fair enough. But my point really is that, if you ignore the occasional blip, like the current one, the history of the world over the last 50 years is that the rich have done nothing but get richer, both in absolute terms and relative to others. The gap between the super rich and the rest has increased, dare I say, exponentially.
Fifty years takes us back to the year before my birth: 1972. Look at the UK in 1972 for the average person, and ask yourself were times better then? Black-and-white TV. No phone connection unless you were well-off (though that was changing). Strikes. Power cuts.
Yes, relative wealth has increased. But I'd argue that matters f***-all as long as most (nearly all) people have a better standard of living. How many people have outside loos nowadays?
I'd much rather live in 2022 (aside from Covid, which was a black swan) than 1972.
I can still remember, as a child, hearing the adults ask each other: “Do you have a telephone?”
Meaning: do you have a telephone connection
The smartphone is surely the most important invention of the last 50 years
I became a teenager in 1986, the same year I started at a private school (so they were not too poor). My parents told me not to spend too long on the phone due to the cost, and because they might get an incoming call.
The world is the same as it was then, but also very different.
As a homesick teenage student at UCL in the 1980s, living in Halls of Residence, I can remember the queue to use one of the three pay phones in the Halls. Everyone jangling their change impatiently, then you got 5 minutes talking to your Mum or whatever. Telephonically no different from the experience of soldiers ringing home in WW2, or journalists waiting to call HQ in movies set in the 1930s
All is changed, changed utterly. An unspoken revolution
When I walked the Pennine Way in 1999, I carried a mobile phone. I also carried some phone cards for use in phone boxes. I don't know when they died out, but I have probably not seen one for well over 20 years.
My great-grandad was born in the 1870s and died in the 1960s. Think of the way the world changed for him: radio, TV, planes, cars, space travel, nuclear power, nuclear weapons, common travel, common international travel, etc, etc.
The rate of compressed change must have been staggering. But people coped.
And so shall we.
Interestingly, pre WWII international travel was remarkably common for Brits who wanted it.
If you were working class you could be posted all over the Empire in the armed forces, or emigrate pretty easily on ships around the world, and if you were middle class choose your posting.
My grandfather applied for the Canadian Mounties and when he didn't get that considered Australia before finally plumping for a posting as an electrical engineer in the Indian Army.
That's far less common now, and we are much more Eurocentric.
Aside from your last line (travelling to Europe *is* international travel), I hadn't thought of that. It's a really good point.
Ubiquitous amongst young men 1914-18 too.
I've recently been finding a bit about my grandfather. Born in 1916 in Catford, he never knew his father, who was killed in WW1. After the war, his mother took the two boys to Cornwall, where there was a relative with money, on whom she prevailed to pay for an education; they were sent away to boarding school in Northamptonshire. However, what money there was was clearly only earmarked for getting them to an age where they could look after themselves, and at 15 he was apprenticed into the Navy (his brother, I think, joined the RAF, if such a thing existed in the early 30s). He spent the 30s seeing much of the world, and remarkable, wrote it all down - his adventures, from the safe, comfortable, suburban perspective of the 21st century seem almost incredible - even before the rather more high stakes adventures of the 40s: leaving Singapore 24 hours before the fall of Singapore, evacuating the King of Norway from Norway, and various other near-death experiences. He was demobbed after the war, but spent his civilian life all over the world too, sort-of attached to the forces in Cyprus, Egypt, Bahrain, Germany and Spain - interspersed with Bury, Warrington, Pinner, Bedford and the Isle of Arran. A remarkable life in some ways - but actually, for his era, not that unusual at all.
Comments
1997 was on new boundaries, too.
Meaning: do you have a telephone connection
The smartphone is surely the most important invention of the last 50 years
Say we have one outlier; for example a person with three trillion pounds in wealth. Does that matter if a) (s)he has no real power over us, and b) we are all better off?
Why does the rich getting richer matter if the living standards of the rest of us increase?
And my *impression* is that social mobility is increasing, not decreasing. If you have talent, and the will, you can be successful. Much more so than in my dad's day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJNds8Am0B0
The world is the same as it was then, but also very different.
And why? Because there has been a global “levelling up”. Especially in Asia. Hundreds of millions of people who were VERY poor in 2008 are now middle class. This is something to be celebrated not lamented. So, OK, everyone in NATO is treading water economically. But a billion people now have fridges, cars, good healthcare, when before they were in dire poverty
This same process, globalisation (allied with technology), also means that someone on a 2008 wage can afford a whole lot more in 2022. Instant communication with the entire planet, for a start. A brilliant computer in every hand
As to the amounts of activity by each party in any particular seat, that's not for me to say.
All is changed, changed utterly. An unspoken revolution
Best was GE1997 when the LD vote share dropped 1.6% but their seat haul went up from 20 to 46.
Guess what, we are living in the best World there’s even been.
His recent book, Rationality goes into much more depth about the media scaremongering causes of our thinking the opposite is the case. Many Amercians still think that more people die in plane crashes in the US (somewhere in the three figures per year, depending on how you measure it), than in car crashes (somewhere around 40,000 per year), because car crashes don’t make the news.
For a single invention, what about MRI machines that have revolutionised medical diagnosis and also psychology/neuroscience in the shape of functional MRI (seeing where in the brain lights up when someone plays the violin and so on)? Invented in the mid-70s so qualifies (in America and Nottingham!)
There are ways for a regime to get around this (witness Russia), but I think those ways are going to get increasingly hard to maintain.
I'm not proclaiming 'the end of war'; far from it. It's just that war is becoming harder for leaderships to 'sell' to their people.
Now, thanks to the much-derided Facetime or Teams, she can talk to her mother free for as long as she likes and it is as though they are in the same room.
As you rightly say, remarkable progress in 30 years - begs the question what the next 30 years might offer.
A lot of Conservative seats are potentially vulnerable to the LDs in the event of large scale tactical voting, although at a guess I'd say that the best predictors ought to be a combination of three partially overlapping measures: average wealth (measured by incomes and/or property prices,) average age, and the vote shares from the EU referendum. Richer, younger and more pro-EU = better territory for the Lib Dems.
That's why, regardless of what happens in the by-election in Devon, you'd think they would have the most joy at a General Election in West London, the Western Home Counties, out along the M4 corridor, and around Cambridge. Only an electoral cataclysm for the Tories is likely to see their grip greatly loosened in East Anglia, the West Country and much of the Midlands.
If, as seems at least a distinct possibility, the Conservatives do end up in opposition after the next election, then this will also entail a shift in the centre of gravity of the party out of the South-East and further into the provinces. It's quite feasible to imagine the count of Conservative MPs left in London being reduced to single figures.
GPS has revolutionised the world in so many ways, and there was no alternative (well, there was LORAN / LORAN-C...). GPS's benefits are not just about pootling around in your car.
The open nature of GPS is worth tens of billions to the world each year. God bless the US military!
My great-grandad was born in the 1870s and died in the 1960s. Think of the way the world changed for him: radio, TV, planes, cars, space travel, nuclear power, nuclear weapons, common travel, common international travel, etc, etc.
The rate of compressed change must have been staggering. But people coped.
And so shall we.
I doubt we’d see a similar item on the BBC News with the vindictive Dorries waiting to cause more damage to the organization.
And the currency / investment / trade picture has been uniquely shite over the past few years. As are current growth and inflation forecasts.
Saying otherwise gives false succour to Tory apologists, and/or declinists.
Margaret Thatcher is spinning in her grave.
The successor seat in the North of Scotland is definitely a goner, mind.
What a shame !
The living standards of the rest of us aren't increasing - the very poor have been getting poorer for many years, and now the process of immiseration is accelerating further up the income scale - and that's why the rich getting richer matters. If the economy is structured to funnel wealth continually upwards, then most of us simply end up spending our lives being shat upon.
The world is changing irrevocably before our eyes, yet few care to admit it.
And Mrs T would be delighted that Boris just today has effectively relaunched right-to-buy (well, sort of).
They just use WhatsApp.
Now, someone who was worth $300m and is now worth $200m, isn’t going to be struggling to pay their cleaner, but the downturn does affect business at a macro level.
Because they're better, not worse.
This doesn't mean we cannot improve things. It's just that 'poverty' might mean a very different thing to what it did back then.
Why do we bother providing indoor toilets in social housing? Bloody ingrates.
If you were working class you could be posted all over the Empire in the armed forces, or emigrate pretty easily on ships around the world, and if you were middle class choose your posting.
My grandfather applied for the Canadian Mounties and when he didn't get that considered Australia before finally plumping for a posting as an electrical engineer in the Indian Army.
That's far less common now, and we are much more Eurocentric.
I expect an increase in this sort of thing, as CHB suggests, though both parties will as you say stand everywhere. The idea will be that those who want to cast a positive vote for a party should be able to do so - not everyone is a willing tactical voter - but effort should reflect perceived genuine chances.
The Greens are not up for such considerations at Parliamentary level, and campaign wherever they can, regardless - as we see in both by-elections right now.
Getting voted out by the 1922 or the wider electorate spoils his winning record, and it is hard to see anything that will add to his legacy — unless someone can think of some policies to reify the slogan levelling up. Today's announcement looks like a ragbag of reheated Thatcherite gimmicks; nothing solid there.
My guess would be Boris has half an eye on Harold Wilson's shocking retirement at 60 (and it really did take the country by surprise) which would take him to 2024 but maybe that looks a long way off now. Early 2023, after England wins the World Cup this December?
And this allows Boris to get seriously rich while still young enough to enjoy it.
But social mobility? I'd be surprised if it's higher today than it was in 1972. There's an LSE blog about one definition of "social mobility" that shows it's fallen in a hole since the GFC.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWnc-ZlIo5s
2010: votes up, seats down
2015: votes down, seats down
2017: votes down, seats up
2019: votes up, seats down
Last time Britain faced such major economic shocks, it had both much lower inequality and stronger community support networks, not just in the 1970's, but even through to the early 1980s.
A couple of years later, this concept would have been totally alien to everyone.
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2019/05/08/millennials-are-some-of-the-worst-hit-by-social-mobility-decline-in-the-uk/
Please someone make it stop.
The relationship between LD parliamentary strength and local council strength remains pretty strong, I'd venture. Whether that will be enough in Guildford or Woking remains to be seen.
As for the Greens, theirs is a more complex situation - some "deals" with the LDs exist but in other areas the relationship is much more adversarial.
As an aside, we're seeing in Europe the emergence of new Green-based parties of the left and centre such as Golob's in Slovenia and the NUPES bloc in the French legislative elections. Past history might caution Labour against getting too close to an emerging progressive movement but it could be the political direction for the mid 21st century if you see environmental policy as a potential dividing line.
I don't believe he has any desire to leave the wallpaper and curtains for anyone else to endure, I mean enjoy.
(They don't give a flying fuck about social mobility, of course. The sooner more social housing is liberated from councils and housing associations, the sooner it can find its way into the portfolios of buy-to-let landlords.)
Or even the much-maligned Deputy PM. Looking at the current cabinet, and at backgrounds, there's probably little chance Patel, Truss, Dorries, Sharma and others would have made a government cabinet in the 1970s; not just because of their (lack of) skills, but because their faces probably would not have fitted.
And I see it in the wider world. I know someone who, whilst at school in the late 1970s, was told that there was little point educating him as he would just end up working at the local mine. Which he did. If that happened nowadays it would be a minor scandal.
IMV we, as individuals, have far more opportunities than we did in the past.
Social mobility is not just about men or class ...
You had the "£10 Poms" as the post-war wave of emigration to Australia was concerned while Mrs Stodge's Mum and Dad went to NZ because her Dad was a GPO Engineer and the NZ equivalent offered him a job and land on which to build a house.
And most think he would sell his own grannie if it meant keeping his job .
They think like Apple, have no interest in supporting anything beyond a regulatory limit.
And I hope the first action of the new Prime Minister is to invite a camera crew into the flat so we can see this bloody wallpaper.
An additional factor is the extent to which LD and Labour supporters are willing to vote for each other's parties in potential tactical situations. I think that could be very considerable at the next GE, to the extent that it starts to hinder the Conservatives' ability to translate their polling numbers into a disproportionately high number of seats. The factors that held back that willingness (i.e. bitter Labour memories of Clegg, Corbyn's takeover putting off LDs) have waned or gone. At the same time we're seeing tacit cooperation between the two parties in the form of token campaigns only in the seats the other wants to win.
I think that in the two forthcoming by-elections, the aggregate increase in the Lab and LD vote shares will be quite modest. But because each party's votes will be more efficiently concentrated than hitherto, we will still see two stonking great Conservative losses.
Anyway in a week or two's time you will be cheering Starmer's FPN and resignation to the rafters and explaining it was a far more egregious breach of the rules than anything Johnson was involved with. I can forward my letter from Alun Cairns for you to brush up on your Johnsonian eulogies.
Seats Vote % Ratio
1992 20 18 1.1
1997 46 17 2.7
2001 52 18 2.9
2005 62 22 2.8
2010 57 23 2.5
2015 8 8 1.0
2017 12 7 1.7
2019 11 12 0.9
The big challenge for the LDs is that in 2001 they were the 3rd largest party of 3 main parties. Now they are in a second tier of 5 behind the big 2 (LD, SNP, Plaid, Green, Reform).
Even maxing out tactical voting, if they are still only on 10% national vote share they'll probably only get around 25 seats
Rather than the wrecking of GDP or the GFA.
Born in 1916 in Catford, he never knew his father, who was killed in WW1. After the war, his mother took the two boys to Cornwall, where there was a relative with money, on whom she prevailed to pay for an education; they were sent away to boarding school in Northamptonshire. However, what money there was was clearly only earmarked for getting them to an age where they could look after themselves, and at 15 he was apprenticed into the Navy (his brother, I think, joined the RAF, if such a thing existed in the early 30s). He spent the 30s seeing much of the world, and remarkable, wrote it all down - his adventures, from the safe, comfortable, suburban perspective of the 21st century seem almost incredible - even before the rather more high stakes adventures of the 40s: leaving Singapore 24 hours before the fall of Singapore, evacuating the King of Norway from Norway, and various other near-death experiences.
He was demobbed after the war, but spent his civilian life all over the world too, sort-of attached to the forces in Cyprus, Egypt, Bahrain, Germany and Spain - interspersed with Bury, Warrington, Pinner, Bedford and the Isle of Arran.
A remarkable life in some ways - but actually, for his era, not that unusual at all.
Now those were the days of the Manchester Guardian!!